Breakaway introduced a load of problems of its own, mostly to do with it being impossible to turn the equaliser presets off: they were causing all sorts of strange sounds on some types of music. I only really want the compression/AGC functions anyway, so I removed that and am back with Stereo Tool which is still producing the same distortion problem after about 10-20 minutes of use.
I've tried increasing the synchronise slider to 1%, and 1.5% and also 2, 3, 4 and 5% without it having any apparent effect.
I also tried using ASIO4ALL, which seemed to install but Stereo Tool just kept giving ASIO error messages so I removed ASIO4ALL. Also ASIO4ALL seems to be years out of date and stuck in the Win7 era, as indeed are VB Cable and VAC.
I notice that there are several sample rate settings both in Stereo Tool and also in the Virtual Cable control panel (44.1, 48, 96 and more). And I also notice that I have three options of output sound card to select: WASAPI, Kernel Streaming and MME. Some of them show sample rate ranges after the name - such as 32-96 - but I still get sample rate error messages in Stereo Tool sometimes when switching outputs. (The output name changes on its own when I turn on the screen connected to my A/V amp, and I have to select the new name myself to get the sound back.)
To me it seems best to set all the options to the same sampling rate (ie 48) so as to avoid resampling, but what are the best output types and sample rate settings to use? I cant find any relevant instructions anywhere. I know that ASIO is supposedly the best option, but that doesnt appear to be possible.
Is there any possibility of introducing an optional automatic sound card restart function into Stereo Tool, that could be set to restart the sound card (say) every 10 minutes? Or is there any other way of doing this? I can put up with the very brief break in audio that this causes.
What I really dont understand is how a modern HDMI card from the biggest manufacturer could apparently have these faults. When used on its own, without virtual cables and audio enhancements tools, it works just fine without any distortion or glitches of any type. The only problem with that is that I have no way of getting uniform output from it, and the volume keeps jumping up and down according to the source material.
Is using the built-in SPDIF output on the motherboard (or fitting a sound card) the only alternative? Seems very backwards to me. I thought the whole point of HDMI was that it can handle everything involved in connecting to an amp and speakers and screen.