Musical Instruments can't be heard

I switched to Zoom after more than two decades of Skype use.  I suffered through learning to deal with the progression of settings to get to “original sound for musicians”.  I had to do a ridiculous amount of troubleshooting with students to work through getting their settings correct, and hit a level of equilibrium with things for a solid 6 months or so.  In the last two weeks everything went to garbage.  I can’t hear one of my students at all (drums), and two (flute and euphonium) are generally so quiet I have to sit perfectly still with headphones on and concentrate hard to hear them. I have gone through my own settings, walked through troubleshooting with my students’ settings (sometimes with the aid of their parents), and used the virtual assistant to suggest possible solutions.  So far the only possible solution that I haven’t tried is having those students purchase a separate microphone to plug in and hope that works.  I refuse to send them on a wild goose chase for what I’m certain is a software problem.

I am at my wit’s end.

I have yet to find a solution to a problem that apparently isn’t acknowledged by Zoom, and hasn’t been addressed in the community recently that I can find - I keep getting suggested posts from over a year ago, in many cases 2-3 years ago.  

Is there a solution to getting all of the noise suppression out of the way? We have original sound enabled, we’ve tried live audio mode, we’ve gone through and checked the windows audio settings, nothing has actually worked to this point.

Is the solution just to give up on Zoom and try yet another platform?