audio skips while recording and playback of video in OBS

Hi Everyone

This is an elusive problem I've been trying to solve for days now and is preventing my launching my stream.

There is a weird 'skipping' or 'hiccup' of audio, like it's cutting out with a muffled pfffft! It's not coming from my mixer, I've isolated that part of it.

It appears to be happening somewhere between the computer and OBS. I've checked my OBS mic settings, I've tried sampling rates of 41 and 48 KHz [am using the Focusrite Scarlett USB unit]

The recording level looks ok.

Tried clearing memory, caches, rebooting, etc.

Here's a short clip so you can hear the problem in real time:

https://www.markwesleycurran.com/media

Any help on this beyond what's already been posted on this I've tried pretty much all the standard solutions but I may have missed something.

Am using Windows 7, my system is pretty robust, and CPU usage looks pretty minimal.

Could it be a buffering issue?

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