E1x2 Crackling and Scratching From Input

[Rasnik]

Been using the interface for 4 days now and tonight it decided to throw a curveball at me. Im getting weird distortion thats showing up through the mic input. The sounds vary and I can only desribe them as scratching, buzzing and popping with clicks sometimes. They are happening randomly and last from 3-7 seconds roughly, and sometimes happen in rapid succession and other times it takes 5-15 minutes. The only change I made to the topping software settings today was drop the buffer from 512 to 128, and now to 256. I have a fairly new and powerful system i just built and the sounds happen whenever, even doing nothing intensive, like sitting in chrome and typing this message out. I have not been able to do anything to try and trigger the sounds myself. I have the interface plugged into my pc case, rear io usb c port. The microphone im using is a Shure SM7B and I also have a cloudlifter inbetween. I have a matched sample rate between all the digital inputs and outputs of the interface and the software itself, and im running this at 256 buffer.
Initially I had both the USB power plugged in along with it being connected to the pc, but I have removed that now and am still getting the same weird sounds.
I was able to record some of the sounds but i quickly grabbed them in OBS so theyre in mp4 format and not sure whats the best way for me to share that.
Dont know why this could be happening as it worked perfectly fine for the first 3 days

edit: Gotta clarify, maybe the distortion was there the other 3 days too, but as i keep voice monitoring low in favor of playback volume, i might not have heard it

 

[Rasnik]

I’ll link YouTube videos of the sound clips I was able to catch later in the day if that helps at all, maybe someone’s experienced the same thing

 

[Rasnik]

I removed the Cloudlifter from the setup and have gotten no weird distortion since. I tested both xlr cables in my setup by themselves routed straight to the interface and both gave no weird noise. So the culprit is either the cloudlifter or the e1x2 sending bad phantom power to the cloudlifter. And as the cloudlifter is somewhat new and ran with no issue on a previous interface, I’d wager it’s the e1x2.

Disregard the buffer info in the original post, the crackling and static noise I was hearing was also in the direct monitoring so it has nothing to do with buffer

Also to my understanding, because the noise floor of the e1x2 is so low, running it at full gain and topped off with 20db of digital gain will yield similar results in noise floor as to using the cloudlifter, can anyone comment on this? To my ear it sounds pretty similar