Universal AudioApollo x4 Gen 2 Essentials + Edition Thunderbolt 3 Audio Interface

The best of the best, not comparable

I was extremely excited to get my hands on the UA Apollo x4 Gen 2 when it was recently announced.I figured that Universal Audio would have worked out some of the kinks that had been present in previous iterations, but I was completely wrong.The setup is a nightmare for Windows 11.I had purchased an asus z790m-plus (as it has Thundebolt 4 compatibility) only to find that I need a separate $150 pcie adapter to connect to the internal Thunderbolt 4 header.Annoying, but admittedly not Universal Audio's fault.Anyhow, things didn't go smoothly at just about every step.After the hardware install, BIOS fiddling, and what felt like an eternity of troubleshooting as to why windows wouldn't recognize the new adapter, suddenly it worked after hours of frustration!The Apollo x4 connected, & UA connect installed the required drivers and and plugins relatively seamlessly. Kudos.But I started to notice that my system was struggling to maintain stability, with audio dropouts, popping & clicking, then out of nowhere... LOUD DIGITAL SCHREECHING.Pleasant.My desktop has a 24 core CPU running @ 6.1 ghz & all the bells and whistles. So it shouldn't be problematicSo yeah!I followed Universal Audio's long, long guide to optimizing Windows for their interfaces, which all seemed like tweaks they could have figure out in the back end while writing their drivers, like every other hardware manufacturer. Just saying.Still didn't help.After looking around a bit, I noticed in the Windows 11 sound settings that the interface is locked at 32-bit (grayed out) and cannot be adjusted to 16 nor 24 (WDM drivers, not ASIO)I believe, as well as other's, thay there may be a correlation.Their ASIO drivers could possibly be operating at a different sample rate/bitrate then the Windows drivers, causing too heavy of a workload for the interface.I switched my desktop sounds to another interface which has helped with the massive critical failures I was experiencing before, but it's still an issue.Honestly, an interface of this price shouldn't be this tedious. Plain and simple.I use Apogee, RME, and various others without issue. So I feel like this is either gross negligence or by design (go-go team Apple).Anyhow, I love the design, unison preamps, plugins & obviously the sound quality! It's designed well, but clearly Windows is a complete afterthought.Get it worked out, UA! Yeesh.*Update*I'm most likely going to have to return it, as it's functionality, or lack thereof, is completely unpredictable.If you open chrome the audio will glitch a bunch, & then if you open multiple programs it'll straight up crash the audio engine.I even got a lovely blue screen of death for the first time in my newest desktop build... hooray.Thanks Universal Audio.