Unable to initialize OpenAL on ~90% of starts

I haven't counted this scientifically but in 9 out of 10 starts I get no sound and the console says this:

ERROR byt Error in class 'LibraryLWJGLOpenAL'
ERROR byt Unable to initialize OpenAL.  Probable cause: OpenAL not supported.

This happens even with the default launcher and an unmodified client and after many, many retries (re-starting game) it works properly.

In case you're wondering: Everything else on my computer works perfectly fine and all my drivers are up-to-date.

As you can imagine, this is borderline annoying. This started happening, I think, with 1.8, although I'm not sure. Never had this issue with 1.7 though!

PS: I've searched before creating a new issue. I've extensively searched the internet and this JIRA to no avail. I found a lot of stuff on the net with that issue with posts ranging back as far as 2012 and I found the search in this JIRA to be not very helpful at all.

Please advise