Popping sounds when browsing web and listening to music over Realtek

I have a Gigabyte Aero 15 X9 laptop, had it for like 14 months now. Due to quaratine, I have been using it more, and I have noticed that I have a problem with DPC latency. The general culprits are ndis.sys, nvlddmkm.sys, and ACPI.sys from latencymon, occasionally storport.sys.

I have noticed this weird issue with popping noises, but it doesn't seem to cleanly align with DPC spikes in latencymon. It happens in both Firefox (my main browser, with/without extensions) and Chrome (my secondary browser for when NoScript keeps something from working properly).

Some websites (not all websites) can lead to a popping audio noise when loading if I am playing music in the background, but there is some weirdness. If the audio is coming out of my monitor over HDMI (NVIDIA High Definition Audio or the Intel equivalent), I don't hear pops. If it is coming out of my computer (whether internal or external speakers) using Realtek Audio, it does occur. If I plug my external computer speakers into the headphone jack on my external monitor (thus using the Nvidia/Intel Audio), it does not occur.

I generally use this 5-in-1 USB-C dongle for cable management (Robot Check), but it is disconnected right now. If the HDMI 1.4 comes out of there, it uses Intel Audio (and the iGPU). If the HDMI 2.0 comes out of the the on-board HDMI, it uses the Nvidia Audio (and the RTX 2070). I don't think it matters if I use the on-board Killer Ethernet or the RealTek Ethernet on the dongle. I rarely use WiFi at home on this machine (my laptop and router sit like two feet from each other).

I am using the 6.0.8924.1 RealTek audio driver from Gigabyte and the latest 9.0.0.50 and 21.80.2.1 Killer Ethernet/WiFi drivers from Killer's website.

I have also tried to use older Killer drivers, but they didn't seem to help at all.

UPDATE:

I backtracked to the older audio drivers that Gigabyte had (AERO 15 (RTX 20 Series) | Laptop - GIGABYTE U.S.A. 6.0.1.8603), but now Realtek Audio Console refuses to work. I uninstalled and reinstalled the console, still no luck

Hi, you could have a look through the ideas I posted here:
Sound buzzing, robotic, skipping issue

Noted your previous thread on this:
What is storport.sys? (DPC latency)

To be honest, that was not particularly useful. That was a desktop with problems of different severity with a very different system. I have tried disabling WLAN and LAN etc.

The popping was limited to the RealTek audio, I think but don't know for sure. I backtracked to an older Gigabyte-issued audio driver and at least some of the popping stopped. However, I also lost Realtek Audio Console at the same time.

Update: I heard to pop with said older RealTek audio driver. I still do not hear it over the Intel or Nvidia drivers. If I uninstall and uninstall the drivers for the RealTek drivers, they re-appear on restart.

- - - Updated - - -

I tried uninstalling Bitdefender and going to a page I knew caused pops. No pops. Restarted laptop and tried again. No pops.

Installed Bitdefender again. Pops.

Bitdefender seems to be a suspect.