Sound crackling problem using Traktor Audio 10 soundcard for DAW use.

I have been battling this problem for months and I have absolutely no answer. I have read so many other people's similar problems and solutions, of all kinds and I can assure that I have tried nearly all of them.

I am producing music in Ableton live 8 and have done so for roughly over a year. This problem has been around all along. I DJ on TSP 2 with the Traktor audio 10 sound card. I also use my sound card for my ableton live production as I have not been able to afford a new external sc and i find this soundcard to be very nice. It runs on asio drivers (asio4all). My monitors are new, only 3 month old Adam A7X. the rest is pretty irrelevant, keyboards, no mixing board (which i plan on getting soon and the only option i leave to debate which could fix my problem).

The sound crackles and pops quite badly at higher volumes and especially low frequencies (atleast 150hz and lower, low bass and sub bass, toms, kicks) I have not noticed it at higher frequencies very much, but it does persist. It does not appear to be a cpu load issue as I keep an eye on it and the only time it starts to crackle with that is when it gets over 30% ish, given it is not already crackling. It is especially out of control when using Kontakt as a standalone. I have made sure that my soundcard is on the same frequency range as my my DAW or software I'm using. I keep both on 44100hz.
Within the traktor audio 10 control panel I keep the process buffer on 256 samples, however i have been trying to use it on 512 to see if it reduces, not certain luck shows. my USB buffer is 2ms. Using 256samples and 2ms buffer my output latency is 11.2ms which i find quite nice, however using 512 my output latency is 17ms which i find unbearable.

I dj using the same monitors and same soundcard with my laptop and TSP2. The sound is smooth and never crackles or pops unless i set my latency below 10ms, then the cpu meter is quite jumpy. I know it is not the soundcard itself.

this problem has been around for months, before i got my adam monitors. and on both a very optimized win7 ( no wireless and no aero theme as the big ones) and the standard win8 install when i recently upgraded. Also if anyone has any tips on optimizing win8, i would love to hear that as well.

Any and all feedback is welcome, if you have any other questions about the setup i'm running, please let me know.

Thank you.