I just checked and I can hear the pops in the drum track as I play it in biab before it is rendered and exported as a wav file. It happened at a buffer size of 512 and the maximum buffer of 4096.

I think that excludes anything to do with Cubase.

And because it occurred when I exported it previously using two different drivers (Quantum ASIO and Windows MME) I think that excludes the Presonus audio interface.

So... next I will hook up my 2020 biab SSD and see what happens.