OK, I just want to pause and say a BIG thanks to all those that have commented and thought about this problem. You guys are great, smart and helpful. I've never needed to deal with any of this in the past and it's nice to have a group of friends willing to help. We all think the same in that we let the evidence decide what path we should take. [It's too bad our politicians don't think like we do.]

Thanks also go out to PG Music for hosting such a useful forum. My way of giving back (even if it's feeble) is to feed back what I'm discovering so you and others may somehow benefit in the future.

I have a few things to do based on your great suggestions and if I don't respond to each post it's because it's hard to keep up with the volume.

More specific to this issue; I finally was able to reach a Tascam engineer. And not surprising he says "hey, if the 208i works fine with your Win 11 i5 but not with your Win 11 i9, then the problem is with your i9 even if it's brand new." He has a point especially now that my 1st LatencyMon results have come in showing that there are issues. He also said he recieves calls all the time for "snaps, crackles and pops" and that most of the time it's a sampling frequency problem. The Tascam wants 44.1 kHz but there may be a question about Bit Depth. From what I can see the version of Win 11 I have on the i9 does not support 16 Bit, I don't recall if this is true for the i5. But the Tascam manual says the 208i supports "16/24". This might be a Dell question. And semi-ironically he too pointed me to LatencyMon via his concern of DPC Latency. He sent me the link below from Sweetwater.

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/solving-dpc-latency-issues/

Special thanks to RustySpoon for making me aware of this program. And I'm still going to replace the USB cable, do the DeoxIT and other good housekeeping measures. But the foucus now seems to do whatever will make LatencyMon happy.

Finally, a couple years ago when I was quite young with BiaB I suggested that a PDF-document based "How To" set of files be maintained for problem solving puposes to avoid re-inventing the wheel over and over. This thread is quite lengthy with a TON of wisdom and experience embedded in it. This total experience is measured in man-centuries! What a waste if all this effort and wisdom becomes just another thread buried and lost in the cyber ether. When we have finally reached victory the subject of how to eliminate audio noise could be a great subject for such a How-To document. It may turn out to be 5 or more pages long but look how convenient it would be to simply point someone in the future to such a document . . .

OK, thanks again to all.

--Steve

https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2025 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.