I scoured the web and forums for a solutions and found nada.
Came across "radman" in one forum who said the problem lies in the
'Audio Hardware' section under Preferences. I remembered I had installed
a 3rd party Audio plugin for the OS called 'DPS' - which is great by the way.
I changed the output from Built-In to DPS and now it's perfect, including the video playback which
was also slow. Try changing your output and see if it works.