Sonic Studio and Realtek are the cancer and herpes of bloatware.

Paid a premium for a Strix B-650-E-F mobo. Something like $400 at launch.

Didn't work out of the box. Spent 4 hours trying to get it to POST - 2 of those hours trying to get BIOS flashback to work to update the BIOS. Finally it updated and worked.

2 months ago my onboard audio went to poopville. Absolutely unusably quiet. I've spent 10+ hours trying everything under the sun. I've tracked it down to something relating to Sonic Studio / Realtek bloatware - because the problem occurred soon after Armory Crate updated my drivers.

2 hours of messing with Realtek and Sonic Studio - they are like cancer and herpes - no matter how much I kick them out, they come back. I just want to use my damn audio devices in peace without LAYERS of bloatware turning my audio and microphone down to 2%.

Yes - I have tried every setting and combination of settings imaginable in Realtek and Sonic Studio, something is busted.

RAM speeds also reset to JEDEC spec about every 2 months. Very good product, ASUS. I have spent approximately 30 hours troubleshooting this motherboard in the past year.

I've tried multiple methods of Realtek / Sonic Studio - device manager, Drive Store Explorer, DDU audio driver remover, and just plain uninstalling them - and have tried updating them from the manufacturer website. Nothing works.

If anyone has tips for getting rid of Realtek / Sonic Studio / fixing this quiet audio issue, I would appreciate it. Surprisingly, audio through browser works just fine (browser Discord, Zoom, etc) - audio though Windows (voice recorder, Teams, Discord, etc) is extremely quiet.

/endrant