Sound and save issues with lr-pcsx-rearmed

[Anavaray]

Hello everyone.
I'm a newcomer to Retropie. Some arguing with Reicast over controller input aside though, set up has been going great for me and I'm having a blast with my little device. However, now that I'm trying to set up some Playstation games I'm running into some minor issues I haven't been able to find solutions for.
Since I'm rather new I could be overlooking something obvious, but I'm hoping you'll be kind enough to point me in the right direction if so.

I'm running Retropie 4.0.2 on a Raspberry PI 3B, using a premade image.
The emulator I'm using is lr-pcsx-rearmed. I currently have no bios installed, mostly because I have games from more then one region and I feared locking some of them out. If there's ways to deal with that, I'll gladly add bios if this would help.

My first issue pops up when playing Symphony of the Night. The game runs beautifully and looks great. Unfortunately both in the first area as well as the alchemy laboratory, I'm faced with sound issues. The music will be fine for a while before crackling and then letting out an ear piercing screech that has me cringing every time it happens.
Is there a way to adjust sound emulation or another setting that helps with this? I've tried all the audio drivers in the Retroarch setup for psx, but none of that seems to make any difference.
I'd try lr-beetle-psx, but quite frankly I haven't been able to locate it. It doesn't seem to be installed, nor can I find it under optional packages.

My second problem happens with Blood Omen - Legacy of Kain. (Maybe pcsx doesn't like vampires much?)
Again the game runs fine, sound great too this time, only I'm unable to save. The game will state it has saved but upon restarting the game it claims the memory card is corrupt and won't load the files. I'm not quite sure where to start looking with this one, especially since Symphony for instance, saves just fine.

Any insight to these problems would be very much appreciated.