Inspiron 7567 choppy audio

Audio was of poor quality before tinkering with the "Wave MAXX" application. Now that I've found settings I like, the speaker audio sounds fantastic (headphone audio is another story, but thats not the point of this post.) However, when I first start streaming audio or plug in a USB device, audio will break up and sound choppy for several seconds. Once it clears up, audio can be fine for hours - at least until I plug in another USB device.

Admittedly, this is a pretty minor problem since it only happens occasionally. But I'd like to clear it up if possible. Why might this be happening? I've never had audio issues like this with a laptop before. Is it because of the extra CPU cycles required for audio processing getting interrupted when streaming/connecting a USB device?