"Popping" noise in recordings - old problem but new to me

Noise is ruining my recordings of mostly classical music (WAVE examples attached). It started on replacement of a faulty mobo with a newer, more capable, GigaByte Z690 UD DDR4. Others have experienced this problem, described as "popping sounds" and I have unsuccessfully attempted their recommended alterations to my registry.

My regeneration of an old thread has been marked solved, but not for me.

Homebuilt running Windows 10 Pro - 21H1 Build 19043.1348

Popping/crackling/skipping, etc is a frequent problem post. No "one fix" for the problem.
Wi-Fi is one cause.
Make sure you have the correct model specific Sound driver from Gigabyte.
Gigabyte Easy Tune program has been known to cause audio problems including dropouts.
Some NVIDIA video cards have been an issue on recording studio machines. AMD video and Intel CPU video do not.

Download and run the free (and popular) Resplendence Latency Mon.

Hello, sounds like a buffer issue to me. Increase your buffer.

You went to the wrong thread that's for a different problem.

The "classic" popping sound is a power management issue for laptops. It occurs at the beginning of a song when audio chip wakes up and at the end of a song when the audio chip goes back to sleep. You don't have a laptop so it doesn't apply to you.

You won't even find the registry item because those are old registry items for legacy Realtek audio drivers (with Realtek HD Audio Manager). They don't even exist in the new Realtek DCH drivers (with Realtek Audio Console).

You have a brand new motherboard with audio drivers dated in the last couple of months. It's not a driver issue. Windows audio drivers are designed not for critical audio work where latency and buffer size creates pops and clicks. It works as intended and Gigabyte won't consider it to be a bug.

Reduce the bitrate if you set it to some insane 192 kHz and reduce the buffer size.

Opened the speaker properties and dropped the sample rate from 48000 (dvd quality) TO 44100 (cd) and it fixed the problem.

I did experiment with higher rates and all presented the noise.

Thanks to all who replied, the fix came from Microsoft who provided specific steps to access the sample rate and change it, as recommended here by CMArbres. A few of the suggestions went beyond my knowledge which is not surprising considering how technical and "niche" computer audio is.

I marked this solved as it is solved for me, now.

Good to hear your sound problem is "fixed".

Some of my more technical items are from working many audio issues.
I have a recording studio and sound problems in the recording world are major issues.