[jrockway]

Onboard audio frustrates me greatly. For a long time, I always used my onboard audio to an external DAC + amp. With my most recently build (circa 2020) there is something wrong with the USB bus that it's on (gone are the days of PCI audio interfaces, I guess) and it just randomly skips and cuts out. The rest of the USB ports on the motherboard work fine, it's just this internal one that's unreliable. (Though sometimes if I have a bunch of cables connected to ports but not devices, USB becomes flaky. This happens if you're developing hardware and you have a couple J-Links and random microcontrollers on breadboards hanging off your USB bus, but sometimes you disconnect them all to take them back to your lab bench. Then your mouse randomly stops working...)

Anyway, external DACs are the way to go. My external DAC supports USB in addition to optical, so I just use that, and everything is wonderful. I have a cheap USB <-> XLR device for audio input. Again, no problems.

All in all, I've never had great luck with onboard sound. I am not sure why it's hard to get right. Maybe it's an Asus thing. For some reason I always end up with Asus motherboards.