" rel="nofollow - Sounds like you have also traveled the well-traveled road yourself.
AsRock offered for me to send my board into them for 'testing' since the rather condescending little man on the other end of the phone literally denied any known issues with sound on these boards and that it "must be something I was doing" etc.
I declined as it is a time wasting charade, and he knew that as much as I did. I was also close to sending the board back to Amazon, but other than the MSI Carbon Z370 board which uses a slightly different version of the ALC1220 chipset, there weren't other options that didn't have forums full of angry customers complaining about the same thing!
It's puzzling when you find the people (with usually 1 post - mobo employee most likely) posting that they have absolutely no issues at all "after a clean install of Windows". As you pointed out, this process is no longer the panacea it once used to be for system issues and instabilities.
I actually have a friend who ironically has the same board and literally the same CPU (well his is called an i7 8700k - I tinker a lot so spending the extra for a pre-binned version was beneficial to me) and he reports none of the issues I have. But he is still using Realtek drivers from around March and is on BIOS 1.80 - my board came with 3.10 and I'm not sure downgrading will achieve anything other than open me up to security vulnerabilities.
There is one difference with my friends setup - he does not use the front panel audio connections, instead plugging directly into the motherboard. Admittedly, the sound issues are far less pronounced when I have tried this, but it wasn't a 100% fix for me. He's also using lower end turtle beach headphones, I'm using a nice set of V-Moda M100 crossfades - perhaps I am hearing the issues amplified through better cans? The so called "NE5532 Premium Headset Amplifier for Front Panel" is somewhat debatable.
What is still absolutely bewildering is the fact that the Microsoft HD drivers do not suffer from the absolute unusable front headphone connection quality that the Realtek drivers embody. It's obviously not an interference thing, it's absolutely a software issue. The only sensible conclusion is that Realtek just simply don't care to invest the resources to fix their drivers for this generation. Microsoft on the other hand have more of an incentive to ensure the average guy who plugs his headphones into the connection on the front of his new PC has a good experience. I wish that we had more options other than Realtek - the problem with lack of choice creates laziness.
As for what to do, I am almost out of ideas. I've tried a bunch of drivers from different manufacturers and different dates, admittedly I have had more success with the MSI/Asus drivers which leads me to believe that their engineers actually bothered to take the time to tailor them somewhat to their products - AsRock is adamant that no motherboard manufacturer touches Realtek's drivers in any way.
I'm genuinely thinking of going back to Win 10 v1607 - that was solid. Of course I will have to get really creative with Gpedit and registry changes to stop the constant attempts to force updates, but I am confident I can figure that out. What concerns me is the security aspects, but in reality the risks for a home user who is sensible about their online usage are still minuscule I'd imagine.
The other option is to invest in a dedicated PCI sound card - that's probably the direction I will end up going for this build and it's something that can go beyond this build too so likely money well spent.
Thanks again for your reply.
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