Experiment with the Windows power settings to see if it makes a difference.
New drivers are sometimes not the best ones.
What is "wired to AC"?
I agree about the drivers, but going that far back would put my driver version before my device existed, so I have some doubts about how well everything would work at that moment.
By wired to AC I meant that I'm doing all of this with the laptop plugged into its charger, instead of running off the battery.
I would try to take the WDM driver out of the equation so you can see whether the source is producing garbage or whether the WDM driver is doing it
e.g. you could use https://vb-audio.com/Matrix/ to route into MC asio line instead of the WDM driver
if that works then it gives some clue as to where the actual problem lies
Thanks for the tip!
Okay, I did give Matrix a try and after struggling to figure it out I think I
might have gotten something out of it.
Routing TIDAL to "VBMatrix In 1" with maxed out volume works with no issues, and using Matrix to output that to FiiO's ASIO Driver works perfectly as well, but trying to route it to JRiver's ASIO In using the same 2 channels in the 64A Slot proves to be spotty at best.
I'm completely unable to go anywhere above 44.1kHz for the sample rate, and so far, I'm only able to get some sound if the FiiO driver is used as a WASAPI device, set to Play, and then immediately rebooting.
After that, I get sound when starting everything again, though with some skips in the playback, and changing any settings anywhere along the chain breaks playback again.
Also tried using the Realtek ASIO driver as an output in VBMatrix just to be sure and got nowhere as well.
So far it seems that both Matrix and FiiO's ASIO are working well, and JRiver's ASIO is at least receiving audio itself, but getting further than that in the chain has me stumped at the moment.