After doing some fiddling and searching, I discovered that if I disabled "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" in my device manager, everything stabilized! Apparently the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery clashes with the drivers of many audio interfaces and causes latency spikes, dropouts, crashes etc so disabling it seems to solve a lot of problems. The only difference this will make to your laptop is you won't have any display showing how much battery is remaining, a small sacrifice in my opinion.
To disable it go to control panel, click into system, choose the hardware tab, click device manager and disable Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery