Hey Andy,
I think you pretty well summed it up, yes.
I went through the same thing with my XPS 13. It basically doesn’t work for audio purposes without tons of clicks and pops.
The usb ports on the left side and right side are actually different in terms of compatibility and the left side are thunderbolt while the right is not, so I got the SQ to work through the usb port on the right side of my xps 13, but the audio was completely unusable due to consistent popping and crackling sounds.
It works fine with a macbook pro.
I also have used a waves card in the sq to output and record audio to the same right side usb port on the same xps 13 and it worked perfectly. This was via a cat6 cable from the waves sq card plugged in to an ethernet to usb-c adapter plugged in to the usb-c port on the laptop (right side only, doesn’t work with ports on left that are thunderbolt usb-c) and using waves soundgrid drivers etc. Waves informed me technically this is not a supported/approved configuration into the xps, so they won’t guarantee it, however in practice it seems to work perfectly for me.
So yeah, in conclusion you don’t want to use the usb-b into a dell xps.
