Continuum,
Please tell me your timecard number and I'll request that you get a pay raise! Switching the USB compatibility to 2.0 (in the VM Settings for USB Controller) seems to correct the audio distortion. I stressed the system with heavy math calculations bringing the CPU utilization to 60% and audio remained perfect instead of total distortion.
The solution makes sense. USB 3.1 has (if I'm not mistaken) speeds up to 10Gbps. I'm not sure if USB data is shared physically or logically over an out-of-band communications channel but either way, I can imagine the difficulty in writing drivers to handle those speeds. Fortunately, my VMs have no need for such high USB transfer rates.
I'm satisfied with this this but can imagine there are VM users out there who need to utilize the full USB 3.x bandwidth. I wonder if the VMware folks will be able to develop a solution for that. It will be interesting to see how it progresses.
Thank your for your help!
Regards
Ray C
