Audio Recording Crisis

This is a quick update / post for advice. Last night I noticed two recording sessions I made for the next Game Dungeon episode ended up being severely flawed to the point I had to throw them out. What would happen would be my voice would be recording normally, then would suddenly cut out to drastically reduced volume. It has since stayed highly erratic. People have sometimes complained of crackling in the live video chats with fans, it’s possible that was a prelude to this. You can listen to a sample I recorded here:

Sample of recording screw-up

Feel free to email me with any suggestions if you’re knowledgeable with this sort of thing. I’m really stumped as to what the problem is.

THINGS I’VE TRIED SO FAR:
-Swapping different microphones
-Swapping different XLR cables
-Trying microphone that doesn’t need phantom power
-Changing USB ports for my DAC
-Uninstalled / updated DAC drivers
-Trying different audio editors (Audition / Audacity)

POSSIBLY USEFUL INFORMATION:
-I am using a Focusrite Scarlett Solo DAC for my audio. I’ve owned it for about a year and a half.
-I’ve had a lot of “ghosts in the machine” with my USB ports on this motherboard in the past. It got so bad using external hard drives was simply unreliable (would reliably cause file copy errors) unless I plugged them into a different port. Whenever I plugged in a device like the webcam, I would often have to plug the device back into an old port for it to work again. It got so bad I bought a PCI-E USB 3.0 add on card, which solved the problem completely. Since I wasn’t experiencing any problems with my DAC, I left it plugged in to the motherboard. Since then, I’ve switched to the add-on card, but the problem persists.
-My motherboard is an Asus P8P67.
-In the past I used a Xonar DX soundcard. It had great sound, but would periodically give me severe driver problems to the point that I felt like it was unusable for the long term. I haven’t used it since I had the DAC
-I have not experienced any audio playback problems at any point in time, just recording.
-I am absolutely willing to buy new hardware if necessary, but I don’t want to waste my money if I have good equipment and made a bad diagnosis.

CURRENT PLANS:
-If I can find the right cables, I plan to use an old pre-amp and redirect everything using motherboard audio. If that works, the sound won’t be quite as good, but will hopefully be good enough to finish the next episode. If that doesn’t work, I’m completely out of ideas
-This has delayed the next episode by at least a day. If I get it solved today, then I’m predicting Wednesday for its release. If not, then everything is in limbo until this gets fixed.
-In the event motherboard audio works, I don’t want to do that as a long-term solution (I can hear the difference between dedicated soundcard / DAC audio v. motherboard audio). I’m certainly open to suggestions.

ADHD version: Ross is having for real audio problems. Will finish next Game Dungeon as soon as he gets a temporary fix.