I think you are closing in on it. You must solve the problems showing up in Latency Monitor. If you hear the crackle at all when using that Test button, you have no hope of getting glitch-free audio.

Latency Monitor is a great diagnostic tool but it doesn’t give you much help in fixing bad results. For that reason, I still recommend the free DPC Latency Checker. It has a lot of tips! One caution: it has not been updated, so the readings you get in Windows 10 or 11 look way too high. Ignore that. The ‘new’ baseline is 1000. A perfectly tuned win 10 or 11 PC will read around 1050 to 1100, in the yellow. Using that as the new zero, track down the cause of the spikes. DPC runs and you see the spikes occurring. If, say, a spike appears every 35 seconds, or whenever you move your wireless mouse, you can start to track it down.

You most likely have one of three culprits: WiFi nearby, a wireless mouse, or some program that starts up with the computer and runs in the background. That could be all kinds of things, so you first go to startup programs and disable them one by one, reboot, and test. If that doesn’t do it, look for Services running that are not by Microsoft and kill those one by one and test. DPC can run throughout and you see the results within a minute. And kill Cortana too, just because.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.