Thank you for playing! Yes, the controls were mimicking a joystick-like handle, as I felt it would enable greater navigation speed for the player (e.g. top left to bottom right does not require tapping multiple times).
As for the audio, I am not sure what it could be, but I probably have to clear more Adlib registers at the start of an audio track, to account for machines which do not do that by default (not that they have to, I admit!).