I figured I’d let everyone know what I did to get the UR22C sounding amazing.
I have a regular Asus Vivobook with an i5-1335U. Not the slowest chip, but not the fastest either. The built-in Realtek audio chip deals out an impossible 8.4ms output latency.
When I first plugged it in, of course, I tried to get the latency set very low. It sounded awful with substantial glitches. I could tell I was hitting a drum pad and the timing was fantastic with sub 3ms RTL, but it absolutely couldn’t be played live and certainly was not what I wanted to hear while tapping in music.
I found a guide online that has many ways to tune your computer for audio - not going to plug that specific website - but there were many websites like it.
I ended up turning off the Intel hyper-threading in the BIOS, turning off Anti-Virus, optimizing Windows for background applications, turning off all the eye candy of Windows 11 except for the font enhancements. I already had the paging file turned off.
I also needed to reboot fully whenever I wanted to use the UR22C. Coming out of standby, the latency was bad from the unit. Apparently, the drivers don’t revive properly from standby. Rebooted and that fixed it; of course, turn off the antivirus again.
Now, I get some slight pops when at 48KHz and 32 samples with standard mode. However, when I kick it up to 192KHz and 128 samples and standard mode, all glitches go away and it sounds great. The output latency is 2.9 ms and input is 1.9. This is definitely acceptable for me.
I’m sure I could tune the laptop further, and I will in the future, for now this is working. I’ll probably go after the multitude of services running in the background with a script or something. Next I’ll see about shutting off Windows Defender somehow (Windows denies shutting it down). With those further tweaks, I’ll shoot for switching it to Low-Latency mode and getting it sounding good with an RTL sub 3ms.
All that said, I hope this information helps anyone that is dealing with glitchy sound.
Best,
C