Windows 8.1 sound stutter

Since I installed Windows 8.1 I have had audio issues.
On any given system load the sound will occasionally stop for one second, and then just resume. This happens while watching videos, listening to music or playing games like BF4.

I installed all latest drivers, lowered the playback quality of sound to 16 bit 44100Hz but nothing seems to work.
I am getting no help at all from Microsoft (not that I expected that) and the stuttering is driving me crazy.

My PC specs are the following:
OS: Windows 8.1 64 bit
CPU: i7-2600k
Motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P8Z68-V (LGA1155)
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
RAM: 8GB

EDIT:

I deleted some stuff I had also installed on windows 7 (virtual machine programs) and somehow the amount of stutters significantly reduced. I now get them once in like a few hours.

Solution 1:

if you use windows 8.x you cannot use DPC Latency Checker, its outdated for that OS, try LatencyMon Instead http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

also try downgrading the sound card and sata controller drivers to older versions and see if that helps

running msconfig and disable unnecessary software/services on startup is also a idea