Since this thread was hi-jacked for the issue with the broken audio driver stack, I will report my solution here. After months of dealing with the cable and voicemeeter driver problems where the names got crossed with other devices on windows 10, I finally found a solution. The problem happens when you uninstall and reinstall vb-audio cable and voicemeeter multiple times for whatever reason. This corrupts the drivers in the windows registry and cross-wires the various audio devices with the wrong friendly name. That may not make sense to you, but trust me, it's complicated. Just nod and say okay. vb-audio cable and voicemeeter are the first products I've seen do this to the audio stack. Maybe something with latest windows 10 triggers an otherwise harmless bug in the installer. Anyway, here are the steps for solving the issue you see in the device manager screenshots in the middle of the first page of this thread.
1 - Uninstall/Remove all audio cables and voicemeeter.
2- Show hidden devices in the device manager and remove all of the vb-audio devices and any other audio devices you are certain are not in use and grayed out.
3 - Research, download, and run Device Cleanup Tool as admin and remove all of the vb-audio devices and the others you are certain are not in use. It has last active time to help you decide. Note, I recommend keeping your other audio drives handy just in case you need to reinstall them.
https://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html
4 - Optionally research PnPUtil.exe
https://sourcedaddy.com/windows-10/mana ... kages.html and remove the vb* driver packages from windows.
5 - Advanced users: At this point you should be free of "vb-audio" references except where other third party applications have made references to the devices, like recording/editing/production software, which can be ignored (You will have to select the correct audio devices in those apps later). Run registry editor to make sure by searching for "vb-audio" and ONLY remove things if you are an advanced user and know exactly what you are doing. Always make system restore points and export your registry into a .reg file so you can restore things you accidentally delete, by copy-pasting the deleted into a new .reg file and reimporting it. Anyway I did this step, so I don't know how much of an impact it had on the real solution. Try this as a last resort maybe if you have to do these steps again.
6 - Reboot and make sure your audio devices are working properly. Reinstall drivers as needed. Move usb cables to different ports if needed.
7 - Reinstall voicemeeter and audio cables one at a time with reboots if you want to play it safe. If you're watching the device manager while installing these, you might notice the icons are wrong again but the names should be correct and none missing. This should clear up after the reboot. It did for me.
8- Optionally, as a veteran admin I was comfortable going through the tron script cleanup process suggested by a twitter user, manually cherry picking a few things. I doubt it had an impact on this process but your mileage may vary.
Note: I ended up having to reinstall my mackie profx v3 usb mixer drivers after I was done installing the vb-audio products because one input disappeared during the vb-audio installations. I had to first remove the profx devices in step 2 and 3 again. I imagine there is still some registry badness going on with the audio stack, but everything is working now so I don't want to tempt fate. The only way to be 100% certain is to start with a fresh copy of the OS.
. It allows me to stream on twitch with mics, VLC, Discord, Mumble, Emulators, OBS monitoring and my Régie (Unity) all mixed together, sending back selective sources to selective softwares/hardware. So again : congratulations for this wonderful software that unleashes creativity.