Audio delay completely out of no where. High end PC.

[rockbottom]

I already mentioned your audio routing. Think about it, you're using your Desktop Speakers & Headphones as a Audio Source. Device Timing has been disabled, but my thinking is the Headphones are lagging behind. I would remove the Headphones as an audio source....

Another possibility is the filters you're using are causing the lag.

14:59:51.923: [win-wasapi: 'Headphones'] update settings:
14:59:51.923: device id: {0.0.0.00000000}.{530ee3aa-8e97-47b6-95ef-a323d0e7e731}
14:59:51.923: use device timing: 0
14:59:51.923: [Loaded global audio device]: 'Headphones'
14:59:51.925: Device for 'Audio Output Capture' source Speakers is also used for audio monitoring.
14:59:51.925: Deduplication logic is being applied to all monitored sources.
14:59:51.925: [win-wasapi: 'Speakers'] update settings:
14:59:51.925: device id: {0.0.0.00000000}.{e389f4b6-094d-430b-a93e-baf409d8c0b7}
14:59:51.925: use device timing: 0
14:59:51.925: [Loaded global audio device]: 'Speakers'
14:59:51.925: [win-wasapi: 'Mic/Aux'] update settings:
14:59:51.925: device id: {0.0.1.00000000}.{344c0046-b667-44c0-8d6d-cf036b3cc55e}
14:59:51.925: use device timing: 0
14:59:51.925: [Loaded global audio device]: 'Mic/Aux'
14:59:51.925: - filter: 'Noise Gate' (noise_gate_filter)
14:59:51.925: - filter: 'Limiter' (limiter_filter)

Flow...
Speakers > OBS
Speakers > Headphones > OBS

 

[PeterWhitlocke]

From decades of experience, I've learned to simply avoid Windows OS hibernation (sleeping) outright. On Desktop systems, I disable it (requires using command line process). On my new workstation laptop, I have not disabled 'sleep/hibernation' but I've not used it. and probably won't in most circumstances.
Once computers moved to SSDs, I powered off computers at night, rarely locked. Even before then, I had too many issues with poor system behavior post-sleep. If I absolutely needed to, I'd Lock, or if a flight, maybe use Sleep. But as soon as whatever drove not shutting down passed, I'd do a restart regardless. That has become 'muscle memory'.
so, I've found sleep instability something easy to work around, I simply shutdown when I'm going to be away from computer for more than a few hours. I shutdown every night. Time lost for me is minimal. works for me. ymmv

Windows Desktop OSes have gotten better in regards to sleep, but I still way too many 'oddities', even in recent years, to bother {But I admit that is largely due to trust lost, and MS doing plenty to not rebuild that trust in other areas}. Especially on modern systems when a reboot is so fast ('cuz I remember multi-minute boot sequences). There are also those who use Sleep all the time without problem (at least that they notice), so I'm sure it depends on drivers, running applications, etc.
And I wouldn't be surprised if an audio driver or 'enhancement' is part of issue (but just a guess), but it could be any number of issues.

The question is, can you work in a quick reboot before starting a Recording session? if yes, I'd recommend addressing the suggestions with the other issues mentioned earlier (screen refresh rates, etc), reboot as appropriate, and move on.
The other option would be to learn some OS internal operations and see if some specific service restarts might help, but that would require much more combined time than a year of reboots... so up to you to dig in deep to find memory/handle leak, or driver instability issue, or possibly an OS bug, and potential workarounds without a reboot. I've been in the corporate world where spending significant time and money to resolve such issues was justified. But even in the corporate world, sometimes it was simply decided to schedule a nightly server reboot to deal with an application issue. In the end, sometimes the simplest workaround saves the most time, much like using a calculate net salary in cyprus tool instead of manually digging through every detail.

Same here honestly - sleep has been hit or miss for me for years, especially with audio devices. Rebooting just ends up being the more reliable option.