trying to move more to 96K/24.. for better sound... I really don't want to go that route...
I hate to be
that guy and burst your bubble, but because music is in 24/96 kHz doesn't mean it's going to sound better, especially if you're dependant on material purchased on sites like HDtracks. It's well known that a good portion of the material available on HDtracks and other websites are more-or-less the same masters used for the CD releases, meaning if you ripped a CD and upsampled the 16/44.1 kHz file to 24/96 kHz, you'd more-or-less have the same thing available on HDtracks (or other sites) offered for purchase. Honestly? buying "hi-res" for the sake of it is a waste of time and money. Don't believe me? Start doing a spectrum analysis for the "hi-res" material obtainable from sites like HDtracks and compare them to CD rips, for example. A lot of times you'll see that there's nothing above 20 kHz (and 20 kHz is around the limit of human hearing). To be perfectly blunt, "hi-res" music downloads are a scam, in my opinion.
There are rare exceptions where the material available on those websites is actually offering something that could be considered "hi-res", and even then I still would recommend not paying a premium for such questionable material.
However, the problem you describe (clicks/pops during playback, and not at the beginning/transition) suggest to me you might need to adjust buffer/latency settings, especially if you're using something like ASIO to output (which it looks like you are). I'd open the ASIO driver's control panel and increase the latency to like 20ms or 30ms and see if it improves. If not, keep increasing it.