Haha I wish I could take any credit at all, but they are good eggs for sure

Fingers crossed that does it for you.

In that case I'm going with it being Voicemeeter being incomprehensibly screwy.

Hm honestly not sure. Is Focusrite Control running? Maybe that ties up the ASIO for the Scarlett?

I'm primarily a Mac guy so apologies for vagueness

VM is to blame I'm sure. Essentially, for pro audio you should only ever need to use ASIO. WDM and other drivers are ancient and don't perform well for low latency audio. Have you installed the Focusrite Control software? Can't remember if that also installs a specific ASIO driver for Scarlett

Check out my other replies. It *may* be possible to use Wavelink, if you've got the WaveXLR plugged in. For me, the ultimate solution was switching to a hardware mixer, which obviously is the nuclear option somewhat.

This is a video using the Stream Deck+ but I *think* if you've got the WaveXLR plugged in you can do the same. www.youtube.com/watch?v=diGI...

Just did a cursory google and I think in Wavelink you can choose "Add Audio Input" and include the Scarlett in the Wavelink mixer... hope so

Re the crackles - if you're just recording the mic, which DAW are you recording into? You should be able to increase the buffer size, but use the direct monitoring on board the 2i2 for your monitoring. Should stop the crackles and you'll have latency-free monitoring.

Am I remembering right that if you have a Wavelink enabling device plugged in, you can use other inputs / devices in Wavelink? I'm sure I did that with my old Elgato USB mic.

Omg I love that album so much. 20,000 HARDCORE MEMBERS.

Any chance of a rip to wav?

Ah lovely stuff, cheers!

Same. Any attempt to do so just makes me feel like a short circuiting robot

Sorry for going on

... Thanks to the clipping/limiting that's often applied.

Another culprit is plugins which add "analogue" noise, which gets inadvertently pumped up in mixing and mastering. Compression and limiting have one guaranteed outcome if you level match - quiet stuff will get louder.

During mixing this may well be compressed and pushed up in the mix, which combine to put the noise and the vocal closer together in level, which means the noise will be even more noticeable especially in quieter sections. Once mastered, it can be even more noticeable...

I think it often is a modern production choice. But it can also be an oversight in production and/or mixing that gets worse as it moves into mastering. For example recording a quiet-ish vocal at a fairly low level on perhaps a slightly noisy pre - this will have some low level noise baked in...