The room's last inch of silence: the aesthetic source taps Menu Band's OWN process, and mutedWhenTapped is process-wide — so the in-process Neo receiver was rendering the left channel straight into the mute while every meter read healthy (tap peak fine, both receivers locked, 'signal present' at both ends, zero sound in the air). Neo's leg now renders from OUTSIDE the muted process: the same ac-audio-room CLI blueberry runs, minus the ssh, with the same heal-on-death budget, cleaned up in stop(), and restarted through the healing path on output-device changes; the spotify source keeps its in-process receiver since juked is the muted process there, not us master