I have the same problem on Win 11, with a BFP Pro FS, latest drivers (and older versions as well). This happens only on my work laptop, where I do not have admin rights and Antivirus and whatever is running in the background. RME will tell you it is your computers fault. I think it is not that easy to steal away from any responsibility, because the internal audio never has that problem.

Luckily the problem only appears seldom for my setup, so I have to / can more or less live with it. Still I would appreciate a driver as stable like the standard audio drivers of the internal audio, which never have that problem. On my much slower super old laptop (2016, slow Intel chip) as well my desktop (13th gen Intel) I do not have that problem.

One should not ignore the fact that there are still companies that offer turnkey computers for recording and video editing and this has reasons.

The Near-Realtime requirements of audio processing are just fundamentally different from those of standard programs or benchmarks, where it is not time-critical when the results are being processed / arrive.

These companies invest a lot of work to find components that make this possible under Windows. Above all, the quality of the drivers is critical in order not to occupy the CPU cores for too long. The time how long the driver stays on a CPU core is hard-coded in the driver and requires that the driver developer adheres to the usual programming conventions, which unfortunately is not always the case.

This is nothing which can be solved by Windows process scheduler (or other drivers). For data integrity, low level I/O tasks of drivers may not be interrupted. If a driver blocks a CPU core for too long, where the Windows process scheduler scheduled an audio related task, then an audio interruption becomes very likely, especially the lower the ASIO buffer size is. This is the thing why we use LatencyMon to look for DPC latencies and which driver seems to trigger that. Kind of "detective work" ... next question, how to fix it .. Either driver up/downgrade (trial and error) or other hardware, if it can be replaced.

There are additional challenges with laptops where the settings have to be much more conservative in terms of energy saving because the devices would otherwise overheat. However, the energy-saving functions lead to higher DPC latencies. If these are too high, it tends to lead to problems with audio not being processed in time.

This can all lead to scenarios - confusing for the end user - where audio may work better on an older laptop than on a newer, more powerful system. What matters here is not the benchmark performance of the CPU, but how agile the system reacts to an audio workload (low DPC latency, good drivers, suitable BIOS/Windows settings, ...).

Yes, it is annoying to have to deal with such a topic. But it's just a matter of how computers work...

The safest way to avoid such issues is to contact a system house that offers such tested turnkey systems.

From conversations with the company da-x, I know that they assemble even the components of laptops themselves and test that they work well together. Other companies even use workstation or server components and work together with a mainboard manufactorers to get even a customized vesion of BIOS with special settings (heard this from somebody in another forum, where a friend of him works for such a company).

You won't get this quality if you buy just "any" laptop or computer. You can be lucky or unlucky. Some things are simply a matter of settings in the BIOS and on Windows. Some things can be solved with a dedicated USB PCIe card for the recording interface, but this is usually not feasible with laptops. But if you're unlucky, the computer is suitable for everything, but not for audio.
If it were a general RME problem, there would be many more problem reports. But this is not the case.

However, one important point to note here as I also read your old thread about your issues ...
[ https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=33138 ]

You said it doesn't work on your company notebook (and you don't have admin rights etc), right?
It is common knowledge that Windows installations of companies slows down a computer system massively.

Since Windows 11 you have additionally Kern isolation which kills system performance. Even the gamer scene complained heavily so that Microsoft thought about a gaming mode to switch this "security" feature off while gaming.
Other people use Rufus to perform a Win11 installation to entirely get rid of this (sorry) crap.

I am not surprised that you have issues with audio playback on a company notebook.
I got a lot of company notebooks, from my company, from customers.
And guess what .. They are all extremely lame and unresponsive.
The best they work still after fresh delivery, until your IT department deploys more and more inconveniences to it in the background so that you can really feel, how the performance becomes worse and worse. Opening Excel files, executing Excel VBasic Macros, everything slows down over time.

Also preinstallations from the factory are often bad. Some additional tools for fan control or automatic driver update are so bad coded, that it can slow down the whole machine. Or every so often they do not even deploy a driver/functionality correctly, so that a small HD accelerator (16 or 32 GB SSD cache) was simply not working.

The 1st thing to do is always a really clean Windows installation, avoiding everything which is known to cause issues (strange tools with questionable add-on value) etc.
But, as I mentioned, there is still no guarantee, that things are working as expected for the explained reasons.
There are quite many threads in the forum where such details have been mentioned, to make a difficult topic a little more understandable.

Can you test the unit with another computer?

I'll test it with another computer (will run with windows 10 in that case). The annoying thing is, that sometimes it can take several hours until the "bug" (crackling) appears, but i will give it a shot.
I was hoping that maybe this type of crackling is known/might have a easily known cause, but i guess that's not the case

Ich habe alle Antworten gelesen und jede Menge getestet und probiert. Ich bin auch dankbar für deine (können uns gern duzen) Beiträge und Tipps. Ebenso wie ich es schätze, dass es ein Forum gibt und RME hier auch aktiv ist und viel guten Input gibt. Wie heute geschrieben sage ich nicht, dass es alles die Schuld des Herstellers ist sondern dass es oft eben nicht direkt deutlich ist, ob/ wo ggf. ein Bug oder nicht-optimaler Treiber Probleme verursacht oder wo systembegrenzende Eigenschaften (zum Beispiel durch das USB-Handling im OS) Ursache dafür sein können. Auf der anderen Seite finde ich es seltsam, dass man von RME-Seite Fehler oder Probleme oft beinah kategorisch ausschließt. Daher mein konkreter Vorschlag, Wunsch, Tipp oder wie auch man immer meine Gedanken bezeichnen will, dass eine Aufklärung in Form von einem entsprechenden Artikel, Ergänzung des Manuals, FAQ zu geben und damit den Kunden zu helfen. Das hilft die Kunden zufriedener zu stellen und man spart sich selbst auch mittelfristig Arbeit, da man dann auf die entsprechenden Dokumentation verweisen kann. Die Antworten im Forum sind auch wertvoll, aber zählen nicht direkt dazu, da man nicht von den Kunden erwarten sollte sich die Information aus unzähligen Threads zusammen zu suchen und zu beurteilen, was a) relevant und b) noch aktuell ist.

Der andere Wunsch ist die Probleme der Kunden ernst zu nehmen und neutral zu beantworten (ohne den teils etwas überheblich wirkenden Tonfall). Natürlich kann man denken, dass die Kunden das doch eigentlich wissen sollten. Und das stimmt auch sicher, wenn die Kunden alle Profis wären. Sind sie aber nicht. Das ist bei meinen Kunden (sehr spezif. Messgeräte) auch oft nicht der Fall. Die sind Fachleute auf ihrem Gebiet, aber benutzen eben für bestimmte Aufgaben prof. Geräte. Ebenso gibt es einen guten Schwung an RME-Kunden, die keine Audio-Profis sind (mit viel Computerwissen), sondern eben einfach für ihre Aufgaben prof. Geräte einsetzen oder als Hobbymusiker nicht (oder noch nicht) soooo in den entsprechenden Themen zu Hause sind.

Hoffe damit ist mein Post etwas klarer.

P.S.: Wenn ich in meiner Arbeit Kundenanfragen bearbeite, nehme ich das immer wieder direkt als Vorlage, um das in einen FAQ-Punkt zu bringen. So könnte das RME mit Forumsfragen auch handhaben. Und ja, mir ist bewusst, dass die Zeit immer zu knapp ist, für alles was man machen muss oder möchte.