Hello. In Win 11 Audacity fails to open the same WASAPI recording device which I did use in my previous PC with Win 8 (a month ago). The audio chip is Realtek in both cases - the device settings in Audacity looks identical. I used both 3.2.1 and older 2.0.5.
I enabled MME/StereoMix device in Win 11 settings and now recording from other apps do work both in 3.2.1 and 2.0.5, BUT it looks like this is an analog path, not digital. Attached screenshot shows the very begin of the recording (with 2.0.5 that I use now for reasons) and shows how much is the noise floor during all the recording (here I had no other apps). In Win 11 settings, I disabled all effects in StereoMix so that this should be a raw recording.
Note that most Youtube videos gives the StereoMix as the solution to the device problem, but looks like nobody noticed it records bad signal. That is weird. What is going on?