I stumbled across a setting that makes the procedural audio sound a lot better, simply by switching on "spatialize post effects" on that audio source.

I also realized, for some reason while I was in the shower, that my "saber event manager" was waiting up to 2.75 milliseconds for an event to execute even when the queue was empty so I told it to stop doing that! I think the frame rates are a lot more acceptable now! So embarrassing!

Edit: Not as embarrassing as I had thought but still embarrassing in a different way... My code never got caught in that loop where it was waiting around for 2.75 milliseconds... but the reason my update was more responsive was due to a different kind of error that exited the loop earlier allowing more time for the frames to render.  At least now I know I have a way to throttle the behavior in order to find a good balance.