Very strong crackles and sound delays, what should I do?

Question

Audio

In the last week, I began to observe more problems with sound in games, videos and when listening to music. I am using an external M-audio Fast Track USB sound card.
I carried out analyzes, tests and found out that for some reason the antivirus creates just the wildest delays with its driver (see screenshot). I have ESS NOD 32 version 8, before that it was 9, and the same wildest hold up and it's not clear why this is happening.
I understand that you will say "Change the antivirus for another ...", but how could this be a side problem, because quite recently everything was fine and there were no problems.
Everything works better without antivirus.
Tell me what to do, where to dig further?

Answer 1

I understand that you will say "Change the antivirus to another ...", but ...

I understand that you understand, but for the sake of testing, you can try temporarily disabling the antivirus first. He, in theory , should not affect the sound, but you never know what the developers screwed up. Once Visual Studio stopped working for me, it turned out due to a crooked update of Panda Antivirus.
Considering that sound card driver updates are much less frequent than antivirus updates anyway, it is more likely that the latter is the bug.
Another option is if you have Windows 10. There, with sound, everything is in one place, and the problem could appear due to an update of some system component.

Answer 2

I also noticed that if the antivirus is running, then after some time the problems disappear no matter what I do, and then unexpectedly for some time there are delays again. But the antivirus does nothing of the sort (doesn't update or scan)