Did you run a len check with shntool on the files to see if they were SBE free? If you fixed the SBEs with TLH then I'm not sure what is causing the pops. If the pops are only occuring at the transition from one track to another then that sounds like SBEs. Are you sure there are no pops on the 24 bit files? Might be mic overload or something else that happened during the recording of the show.