thanks for the input Erik, very helpful! assured me that I 've been on the right path.
it's funny how I tried to fix the soundcard, find the perfect latency/sampling rate, bit depth, etc setting whatnot and none of those helped. even installed asio driver. still nothing. So it was not a Windows vs soundcard, cakewalk vs soundcard or cakewalk setting, TTS/Omni. it turned out that the issue must have had to do with the alignment of the midi controller and Cakewalk somehow.), What I did was keep swithcing between the programs on the Studiologic and at the same time observing how each setting changed the 'piano set' in Cakewalk instrument (TTS ). I also brought back down the modulator to the absolute minimum.