[Roseval]

ASIO4ALL has nothing to do with  ASIO, it is kernel streaming.
ASIO is an excellent way to obtain bit perfect transmission from media player to DAC but it must be supported by the DAC as well.
As ASIO is a proprietary protocol, this is often not the case.
 
In case of a USB DAC, WASAPI is a good choice.
It bypasses the Win mixer and plays everything at its native sample rate.
 
It is perfectly possible that removing the soundcard drivers solves it.
Using ASIO or WASAPI bypasses the Win mixer but not the drivers of the audio device.
So even if you send bit perfect to the sound card, the processing by the soundcard might spoil everything.
 
As Win doesn't support UAC2, you need USB audio drivers if the DAC can accept audio > 96 kHz over the USB.

 

[Nazo]

Yes. I know all that. Drivers shouldn't change the sound that much though. Someone screwed up. It may be a fault in something in the UNi driver setup though, but it's hard to say. The thing is, these cards were originally billed as being supposedly much higher quality and etc meant to compete with the big names like Creative. Honestly it has become really disappointing the way ASUS kind of screwed up so much on them and doesn't seem to care to fix it. Kind of particularly ridiculous since one higher end model even has rollable OPAMPs. Not screwing up the audio along the way is kind of one of those really basic things they should have thought of and gotten right. Well, my experience has been that the supposed hardware acceleration of an internal soundcard makes no performance difference even in games that I can really discern anyway, so I'm going to stick with this USB DAC from now on.