Tales of Symphonia sounds issues

[ChodeNode]

Hello from a newbie!

I did some searching on this forum and found this thread:

http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/thread-5.html?highlight=tales+of+symphonia+sound

where quite a few people say sound definitely is buggy. I'm also getting the problem where certain "instruments" sounds like they're not present or are missing notes. I just wanted to see if this was still a problem. Audio throttling helps this somewhat (definitely perfect though), but seems to slow many sections of the game down for me. Is this still a known issue?

For what it's worth, my specs:
AMD quad-core 3.5GHz
4GB RAM
dual ATI Radeon 4850's
on-board sound

I downloaded Dolphin 2 days ago, so I'm using the most recent build. I've used all the settings found at this page:
http://www.dolphin-emu.org/performance.html

The setup guide on these forums (http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/thread-3533-page-1.html) said not to use Panic Handlers but I do have them enabled.

I also occasionally notice flickers to certain letters at menus and such. Is there something that's known to cause that?

Thanks for any help.