Hi all,

So, I got myself a Tascam US-20x20 interface a while back, mainly for reasons of S/PDIF connectivity and general audio/music production.

However, several issues have occurred, most of them minor, if you know how to circumvent them.

First off, for any of you who are thinking of getting one of these, bear in mind that the audio interface's control panel is completely inaccessible. This can be worked around by making changes to the .ini file it creates, or from within a DAW. So, after an irritating start I got everything sorted, or so I thought.

Windows will automatically install a driver called "US-20x20" provided by the "TEAC corporation". For ultimate usability and to enable you to adjust everything to your liking, it is recommended to install the US-20x20 control panel, which comes with a driver called "US-20x20 Mixer".
While both drivers can, on USB 3.0+ ports, be used at sample rates between 44.1 khz and 192 khz, the US-20x20 can exclusively be set to 24 bit, also providing the option to change between various channel modes including mono, stereo and surround, whereas the US-20x20 Mixer can only be used at 16 bit stereo.

The mixing driver has, occasionally, when playing audio, been prone to adding some crackling noise - which is rather insignificant - to the sound that was sent through and it would also distort at lower frequencies compared to the other driver and it wouldn't sound as full as the other driver either - I'm not sure if the part about sounding not as full is me knowing that it's the better quality or if that's an objective thing. It sounds quite good and can reach a decent volume level, it's just inferior to the other driver in that regard. However, the mixing driver includes ASIO, which makes it awesome to use with Reaper, for example, as I could still use "normal" audio such as an NVDA synthesizer without having to resort to another sound card, making it my preferred driver, over ASIO4ALL.

So far so good, I suppose. I've mostly been using the mixing driver, because, despite its minor drawbacks, it would seem like the better choice overall. Since the Windows 10 1803 update, the mixing driver had stopped working though, so I had to use the US-20x20 one, which sometimes makes my voice coming from the microphone sound like a chipmunk, which can be fixed by activating the listen option in the windows sound options and then restarting the device. With the US-20x20 driver not working with ASIO, I wanted to get the other one working again. The thing is, the mixing driver showed up just fine, both in the playback devices tab, as well as in any program I used, however no sound was put through. The two devices have been known to cancel each other out when used simultaneously or when you switched between them, only a restart or logging out and back into my user would fix that, but it had never been as severe as it was then; And I attributed this none-function to the Windows 10 update.
No matter what I tried, removing and reinstalling the mixing driver and the control panel software, disabling and reenabling either of the two drivers, I couldn't get the mixing driver to work again. Only restoring the PC to factory defaults did the trick.
Now I had used the mixing driver for weeks and it worked just fine. Yesterday I thought I'd use the other driver, due to its better sound, as I was listening to some music. So, I set the US-20x20 to be my default output device and played back audio. I even switched to Reaper, which was set to use the mixing driver, while the other was still my default on Windows, but even that worked fine. After putting my PC to sleep and waking it several times thereafter, at one point it would use the mixing driver to output sound, which in that instant I didn't want. A quick reboot solved this problem, but it caused the mixing driver to stop working for good once more. Trying the same things as before, additionally deleting usmixer_20x20.sys from my driver directory and attempting a normal system restore back to when the driver still worked did not fix the issue either. It just turned up an error.

So, if any of you have any ideas as to what else I could try, I'd be very grateful. I don't want to factory restore my desktop every time this happens, and in spite of its flaws, the interface works great for recording as well as normal output.

One more question: If I use my US-20x20 mixing driver, which, as stated above, in the Windows sound properties can only be set to be used at 16 bit, does that mean in sound production I cannot use it in 24 bit, or does Reaper ignore the settings made within the system sound settings?

Thanks in advance!