So now the amusing bit is I can select the VB-audio virtual cable (still installed separately) as the hardware input device instead of using voicemeeter's built in virtual input.

However, it doesn't seem to allow volume-key control on the virtual input or virtual output, only the 1st hardware input, and the hardware output. My first observation is that the distortion is gone with it regardless of any sample rate matching so this makes life much easier and doesn't require reboots if I want to use a different source! So first, fixing all the sampling rates everywhere did fix the distortion in VB-audio virtual cable (VC)! Apparently I just didn't set in all four places (source, input side of cable, and output side of cable, all matched to speaker out)

But ok, you did say there's another product for better quality, although bit-perfect sounds to me like it's just back to avoiding the re-sampling entirely, not improving it. VAC doesn't have this, or not nearly as bad, regardless of the intput sampling rate. Still I suspect there's something wrong with, or at least improvable in the re-sampling. Sounds like an audiophile kind of rational to me. I assumed the reason it doesn't have one, and the reason VAC has it disabled by default, is so that people doing actual sound mixing won't have one more level control they forgot about that is effectively reducing bit depth. I find it weird though to say vb-cable isn't for audiophiles, yet it doesn't need a volume control. It doesn't help that these changes require reboots. I don't know if those are identical to the options in the vb control panel. I used only the windows control panels, which do expose sampling rate options for the vb input and output devices. I did play around with matching up sample rates, but that was before I found the control panel. No reason to give all the good stuff away.

I suspect they aren't donationware, which is fine. I haven't checked out the other options but I will. But if you don't want to say you're providing a virtual sound device, just a cable, then we aren't talking about anything like a real cable, but just an application layer so-called 'cable' which has really no direct match in the physical world anyway, and so any analogy is whatever you want it to be. I still take issue with the 'real cable' analogy in the context of implying that it justifies some functionality or lack there of.

How to use virtual audio cable reddit