Storyline 360 courses - audio not playing or very delayed in published output

I am experiencing this problem too.

I'm working on a simulation that has an alarm tone. As the user navigates the environment and interacts with panels, the tone plays (until the user manually silences them). Since the same tone is throughout the entire lesson, I put the audio file on the Master Slide's 'parent'. This way it can be triggered where ever I need it, and only have to maintain one instance of the audio file.

(the lesson contains proprietary content, so I can't share it)

Odd playback from the published version. Audio drops out after certain pages are visited. Audio is not playing, even though the variable that triggers it is clearly 'true'.

We experienced this in IE and Chrome from our server, then I tried the local copy published on my hard drive. It worked fine. No playback issue. From this, I gather it is potentially a network lag issue.

The audio is a primary function in this lesson. The training is useless to the student if they can't actually hear it.