Audio Change / At wits end....

OK..... Where the hell to begin.. About a month ago, the audio started to go out on my PC, was running a Titanium HD running through my DAC/AMP (Audio-GD Compass), so I figured what the hell, it's been literally forever, lets upgrade and go from there...

Bought a Soundblaster Z, used Revo Pro Uninstaller to clean everything out, installed the card, then drivers and WTF.. no audio out via SPDIF.....

Alrighty, lets go old school, have a Headroom Micro Amp that I had buried in my "leftovers" box, dusted it off, and the only way I can hear anything at all is to have it cranked to max (Cans = DT 880, 250 OHM, 3.5mm adapter being used via "Headphone out" on card [Second port]) so there is no reason it couldn't handle it. I can barely hear any audio, only if I have the volume dialed up to 200% w. VLC..

All Volume settings are maxed. | Audio enhancements are off | Sound driven though: Speakers (Soundblaster Z), show the volume spiking there | Sound - Communications: Detects communications activity -> Do Nothing | Spatial Sound: Off

Settings via App volume and device preferences: Output: Speakers | Master Volume: 100% | System Sounds: 100% | VLC Media Player: 100$

Rebooted: Soooo many times....

Using nVidia, but do not have HDMI sound installed.

Realtek Audio is disabled via BIOS

Windows 10 Pro / Version 1909 / Build: 18363.900

The audio would get scratchy, fade in/out, had it out between a volume pot going bad on the compass initially, but then I ran it to an older receiver with the same thing, leading me to thinking it was the sound card, hence the replacement, but it's gone from moderately bad to garbage afterwards. Now it sounds like it's 5 miles away / muffled... :: Beats head on desk ::

Just did a clean refresh, disabled the audio card, plugged in the DAC via USB, self installed the drivers, no change, may as well be miles away..... OMG.. What the hell is going on?

It's obviously working, but WTH am I missing because this garbage is driving me nucking futs... Sincere thanks for any suggestions / advise in advance.

Suggest you back off and break it down to minimum. Remove the SoundBlaster and enable the Realtek. See if you have normal analog audio with the Realtek.

Another suspect is your power supply or even the old hardware motherboard. Maybe time to update to current hardware. I had to do that for my recording studio desktop.