Throwing my hat into the borked audio ring. Will repost here what I had to say about it on Reddit:

This is the first AAA game I've ever played that noticeably and immediately sounded bad across the board and there are some very.....odd mixing choices on top of the general bad quality. Example: I pretty quickly noticed with my 5.1 setup that when you enter into a 1 on 1 conversation, the voice audio completely shifts to center. So I did what any (in)sane person would do in the name of experimentation after fiddling with every possible software variable and switched out my 5.1 speakers for bookshelf units to assess the difference.

There's still a notable shift in voice tracks when going from ambient speaking to 1 on 1, and it still sounds awful. The stereo setup is slightly less jarring when the audio tracks swap so I'm leaving it for now but holy hell I've never heard a AAA sound department screw up this badly. How this ever got out of the door at Ubi (much less skipped over by reviewers) in this state is a mystery to me. I've played oooooodles of low budget indie games with better sound quality. There's absolutely no excuse for this with an audio department that no doubt has millions of dollars worth of equipment and experience.
Glad I rented the game for a month with Ubi+ instead of buying outright. Won't be resubscribing or purchasing the game either way at this rate, which is a real bummer tbh. Audio aside, I'm really enjoying the experience a lot. Unfortunately, the garbage audio is present in literally 100% of that experience.

So there you have it Ubisoft. Two entirely different speaker setups, every software variable toggled at least twice, still garbage audio. This is not a user error, it's YOUR error. Fix. Your. Mess. Or at the very least, release an uncompressed audio pack add-on for those of us with working ears. This level of quality is embarrassing for a AAA studio and you've lost a sale over it until you rectify it.

Throwing my hat into the borked audio ring. Will repost here what I had to say about it on Reddit:

This is the first AAA game I've ever played that noticeably and immediately sounded bad across the board and there are some very.....odd mixing choices on top of the general bad quality. Example: I pretty quickly noticed with my 5.1 setup that when you enter into a 1 on 1 conversation, the voice audio completely shifts to center. So I did what any (in)sane person would do in the name of experimentation after fiddling with every possible software variable and switched out my 5.1 speakers for bookshelf units to assess the difference.

There's still a notable shift in voice tracks when going from ambient speaking to 1 on 1, and it still sounds awful. The stereo setup is slightly less jarring when the audio tracks swap so I'm leaving it for now but holy hell I've never heard a AAA sound department screw up this badly. How this ever got out of the door at Ubi (much less skipped over by reviewers) in this state is a mystery to me. I've played oooooodles of low budget indie games with better sound quality. There's absolutely no excuse for this with an audio department that no doubt has millions of dollars worth of equipment and experience.
Glad I rented the game for a month with Ubi+ instead of buying outright. Won't be resubscribing or purchasing the game either way at this rate, which is a real bummer tbh. Audio aside, I'm really enjoying the experience a lot. Unfortunately, the garbage audio is present in literally 100% of that experience.

So there you have it Ubisoft. Two entirely different speaker setups, every software variable toggled at least twice, still garbage audio. This is not a user error, it's YOUR error. Fix. Your. Mess. Or at the very least, release an uncompressed audio pack add-on for those of us with working ears. This level of quality is embarrassing for a AAA studio and you've lost a sale over it until you rectify it.