Audition causes DAC to stutter in applications outside of audition (but not windows noises?)

Problem:

I have been having this issue for several months now, and up until today a reinstall of the DAC software and a reboot seemed to fix the issue AS LONG AS I did not open up another app that plays audio (youtube, FB, Spotify, etc) while audition is currently open.

Back story:

my DAC is a Scarlett Solo v2. I have the most up to date drivers, and I'm running Audition on a windows 10 machine. I use the DAC to record audio from a mic that I use to make acapella covers. Sometimes, I like to pull up the original song / other covers for some inspiration, but this is where the problems start.

If I go straight to another application after a reboot (audition not opened yet), Spotify/Youtube/etc. work without a problem. But the second i open up Audition I experience an issue with the external applications as follows:

the audio will still play, but it has a repetitive stutter to the audio. In fact, it seems that the longer i keep the audio playing, the time between the stutters slowly increases. the strange thing is, all other windows sounds work normally (pop-ups, administrative requests, etc). With all of this, any audio I play on audition works completely normally, almost like its taken all other non-windows sounds hostage.

Misc. info:

-The stutter is occurring in the range of roughly 5-10 hz.

-I recently build a complete new system with upgraded hardware, but the issue occurred on both my new machine as well as the old one.

-Once I've opened Audition, the problem still occurs even after i close audition or reboot without reinstalling the scarlett drivers.

Hypothesis:

I typically record at 96000 Hz sample rate, does windows 10 only allow 48000hz sample rate (as it states when I pull up the DAC in the sound preferences)? the stutter seems to approximately double the external app audio playback time. could that have something to do with this? maybe thinking I have a setting that I could change to fix this, but I'm not familiar enough with audition to know where to go...

Any input on this would be very helpful, as this is really making me scratch my head. Thanks!!