ljefe I use phantom live when recording, but it is not on during playback, which is when the issue appears.
I think the issue may be resolved. I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti. What I did was disable all the NVIDIA High Definition Audio instances in device manager, I do not think that fixed it, but then I updated the Intel Chipset drivers and the problem has not resurfaced since then. So far so good.