Sound stutters for the first second or so immediately after pressing play in timeline -Premiere 2025

Ever since the 2025 update I've been having a really irritating sound glitch. Essentially, when i play the play head on the timeline (it doesn't matter where) and press play, the sound stutters for the first second or so. It's a sort of buffering stutter, and then it smooths out and plays normally after that. I have been working on short audio clips that are only a few seconds long, and little to no video besides a simple black color matte. So I'm definitely not overloading any of premiere's capabilities. 

I've been having to work on my projects with the everything shifted over to the right a bit so that I can start playing it and have the sound issue fix itself before the playhead reaches the thing i actually need to hear. It's super annoying. 

It's been happening for a few days now, and my PC have been turned off and on , and premiere has been fully closed and reopened multiple times since the issue started. I don't know if it's a bug, or some new setting I have to turn off. Or maybe it's something like premiere needing like a crazy amount of RAM now to smoothly do playback? Which sounds silly.