Ok, I think I figured this out.
The popping sound is caused by BEATS. There is a setting in the beats audio manager that will shut down the sound card after a set amount of seconds. Its when the sound card is powered back up that you hear the cracking/snap noise. I was able to turn this 'power saving' feature off, and the noise went away, while still being able to use beats audio for all its other features.
Granted, this is really a work around, but I was able to duplicate the problem on demand by setting the timer to 1 second, and playing a test sound every second. It would pop every time.