The sound quality on my laptop used to be absolutely amazing, lots of clarity. I started to notice last night though that it has began to jar up, creating the kind of nice you get if you were to hit the CD player with something and the disk inside was scratched. It's a relatively new laptop, I haven't even had it for 6 months now.

Has anyone else had Oblivion do this to their system? Any way to prevent it from happening anymore without not playing the game without sound or at all?

the game has nothing to do with it. it cannot harm your hardware, unless you play while the cooling system is disabled/malfunctioning in some way. probably some other process interfering with sound, or, a driver that isn't very happy.