Playback Distortion at Head of Every Project

[StevenEsqTwo]

I have a frustrating problem that has been bugging me for ages and preventing me from going deeper with this product.   

At the head of almost any multi-track song I load into CW, the first 3 seconds of playback is almost always jittery, off time and distorted with dropouts and pops.  After about 3 seconds, the track sounds fine.  Every so often the playback from the head is fine.

The problem occurs regardless of whether the tracks are wav files or MP3,  There is no heavy lifting or intense processing going on to cause such problems.  I'm using no effects, no plugins and no automation.   There's also now fancy busing and no audio interface connected.  I'm just dragging garden variety music files into a timeline and playing.

My machine is robust and well tuned: Intel Core i7-8700K CPU @3.70Ghz with 16G Ram, Windows 10 Pro (Ver 1903) on a Gigabyte Z370M DS3H-CF Coffee Lake, American Megatrends Bios F12 dated March 2019.

I have optimized all windows settings for DAW audio (as per various guides) and I'm running entirely on Crucial SSD solid state memory (no disk drives).

I've got my CW preference Playback I/O buffer size at 2048.

The Audio driver is Realtek running MME 32 bit.

Any feedback is appreciated.   

Thank you.

 

 

[HIBI]

Have you tried WASAPI mode?
Probably the best driver mode for using internal Realtek Audio.

[StevenEsqTwo]

Well what do you know?  Changing to WASAPI worked!   

I actually had tried changing to WASAPI before but could never get the sound to pass beyond the output master buss A.   This time, I just had to reconfigure the output to "speakers RealTek audio 1/2" and voila!   It worked.   Thank you.