If I have trouble with mine, I will take it back to the basic Windows drivers. This device normally shows up in the System section of Device Manager. There is an Intel Smart Sound driver available on the ASUS driver site, but it normally deals with speech recognition and such.
When you install the ASUS driver, v.1, it may install install the Sonic Studio utilities. I will have to track that down but the fact they seem to work normally in certain circumstances, does complicate the situation. I assume by "NUC" driver, you are referring to one from Intel. It sounds like you are saying it is the built-in speakers that are having the problem. I could use some help on this, because it seems like it has some pretty easy solution, which I am unaware of. I tried uninstalling it so many times, but it kept coming back.
I tried stopping the automatic driver update from: "My computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Hardware -> Device Installation Settings -> No. And right after installing it I see the HD Audio driver for awhile, and then it dissapears and 5 mins after, Realtek (R) Audio driver appears on its place. Then I realised these are only codecs ( they didnt work out anyways ). I've tried several things today for 5 hours, most of which went in restarting the laptop. My problem is that I cannot keep the Realtek HD Audio driver, since it removes itself from device manager alone right after I instal it. I noticed that when I install Realteak HD Audio driver the sound of my speaker is significantly better and I have the option to enhance it, while when I have the Realtek (R) Audio driver, there is no option menu for enhancement in the properties of the driver. Instead of Realtek HD Audio driver in Device Manager I have Realtek (R) Audio driver, which I do not want.
I have always had pretty low sound on it, even tho it has DTS X Ultra, which did not make any difference when turned on. I have an ASUS TUF Gaming F15 for around 2 months. Today I updated to Windows 11 and I thought that maybe after the update I wont face the same problem with the audio.