tenfoot
Have you tried the wasapi driver? It certainly stopped the occasional glitching on my playlist. Not sure how it would perform under pressure in the studio where latency is crucial as my x32's are for live use.

not using the X32s in the studio. just live. I wouldn't even have considered the wasapi driver after having heard so many times that anything but ASIO is pure evil ... anyway I only had glitching problems once - which were strange by themselves - and occured when upgrading the live DAW to win10. all the sudden X3 could no longer play individual wav files for the 1-2-3-4 count in without audio engine drop out. never figured that out because on win7 the day before it worked, on win10 a day later it did not ... Platinum did not have that problem, either, and bouncing down these 4 count in clips to a single WAV also fixed it for X3 ... so I'll put that to the X-files as I will never figure out why ...

The #1 reason most choose and recommend ASIO: habit. Inertia.
 
For a long time, ASIO was a safe bet (still is) but that was before Microsoft finally got serious about audio and gave us an improved WASAPI in Windows 10. WASAPI can now rival ASIO for low-latency performance.
 
ASIO still has a potential edge because it's written for a specific device, and can therefore be tailored to the hardware in a way that a generic driver like WASAPI cannot. Because the interface manufacturer probably wrote the driver, you can count on it working with that interface. There have been reports of interfaces that just don't like WASAPI, but those are rare. Of course, not all ASIO drivers are created equal.
 
Both ASIO and WASAPI bypass the unnecessary Windows overhead (e.g. Windows mixer, "sound enhancements"), and both will sound the same. If a detectable difference exists, it will be in efficiency - as indicated by the ability to work reliably with small buffers.
 
Pull up your most CPU-intensive project (as opposed to one that challenges your disk drives more than the CPU) and determine the lowest buffer size that your computer can reliably play back without dropouts. Then do the same for the other driver (bear in mind that switching drivers may also change the default buffer size, so you have to verify that you're comparing apples & apples). If both are able to handle the lowest buffer size, then flip a coin to choose your driver.

Rob[atSound-Rehab]
 
not using the X32s in the studio. just live. I wouldn't even have considered the wasapi driver after having heard so many times that anything but ASIO is pure evil ... 

Haha - this was pretty much where I was at Rob. I have to say though, I have been running the wasapi driver for 12 hours today on both a windows 7 and a windows 10 system, and neither of them has missed a beat.
 
The glitching I was getting was whilst the next song in the playlist was loading, so always in the either the count in or the first couple of bars. and no amount of extra buffers made any difference under the asio driver. With the wasapi driver: gone! Happy camper:)

bitflipper
The #1 reason most choose and recommend ASIO: habit. Inertia.
 
For a long time, ASIO was a safe bet (still is) but that was before Microsoft finally got serious about audio and gave us an improved WASAPI in Windows 10. WASAPI can now rival ASIO for low-latency performance.
 
ASIO still has a potential edge because it's written for a specific device, and can therefore be tailored to the hardware in a way that a generic driver like WASAPI cannot. Because the interface manufacturer probably wrote the driver, you can count on it working with that interface. There have been reports of interfaces that just don't like WASAPI, but those are rare. Of course, not all ASIO drivers are created equal.
 
Both ASIO and WASAPI bypass the unnecessary Windows overhead (e.g. Windows mixer, "sound enhancements"), and both will sound the same. If a detectable difference exists, it will be in efficiency - as indicated by the ability to work reliably with small buffers.
 
Pull up your most CPU-intensive project (as opposed to one that challenges your disk drives more than the CPU) and determine the lowest buffer size that your computer can reliably play back without dropouts. Then do the same for the other driver (bear in mind that switching drivers may also change the default buffer size, so you have to verify that you're comparing apples & apples). If both are able to handle the lowest buffer size, then flip a coin to choose your driver.

Thanks for chiming in Bitflipper - your post is music to my ears on this late night having spent the day trying to disbelieve the seemingly irrefutable!
 
The X32's that I have are just for live performance, so reliability of playback (particularly in an active playlist where 2 projects load together) is my main concern rather than latency, but I understand that the latter is a good measure of efficiency. There is no doubt in my mind that the wasapi driver performs better under both windows 10 and, surprisingly, windows 7 with regard to playlist playback. I also found that whilst running the playlist with some decent size arrangements (30ish tracks plus lots of fx) the windows 10 wasapi driver had a buffer of only 264 samples. That is disturbingly close to the performance I get from my RME UFX under the same conditions! The ASIO driver, on the other hand,  was set to 2048 samples, and still the playlist would glitch -  taking the buffer size up or down seemed to make little difference. It's probably safe to say that this particular asio driver has some issues!
 
For whatever reason, the X32 wasapi driver seems far superior in this circumstance. I certainly feel confident in running with it. I am now convinced that not all non-asio drivers are the enemy:)
 
Thanks everyone for your help and input!