The room's true silence bug, caught by the new meters: the tap aggregate runs on the OUTPUT DEVICE's clock (96 kHz on neo) while the tap claims 48 kHz, so captured audio was wrapped at the wrong rate — half pitch had it ever played — and the presentation clock raced 2× real time, scheduling every chunk for a future the render window never reaches (receiver windows showed +1 s drifting to +16 s in 15 s while both ends read 'signal present'). The tap now trusts the aggregate's nominal rate over its own claim, and the sender resyncs its presentation clock with a fresh session if it ever drifts a second from wall-clock + latency master