Intermittant dropouts with Bose Companion 5 & Mac Pro
I recently bought a Bose Companion 5 system for desktop use. Although it certainly doesn't compare to the quality of my $30K living room system, for $399 it sounds quite decent.
The problem has been that with my Mac Pro and Leopard I would occasionally and randomly suffer annoying dropouts and bursts of noise when importing or playing music with iTunes.
This is the top of the line 8-core 3.2 GHz Mac Pro, outfitted with 16GB of RAM and four 1 TB disk drives with a hardware RAID card in RAID 0, so I am certainly not suffering from CPU overload or inadequate performance!
When I was experiencing the problem, I had the Bose USB cable plugged into one of the three USB slots on the rear of the Mac Pro chassis. Also plugged into the adjacent slots were a Drobo disk drive array (at the moment powered off), plus a hub into which my Mac aluminum keyboard is connected.
After reading some other problems, including someone who had added a PCI USB card, I decided to try using the USB slot on the front of the chassis.
Voila! No more dropout problems! Yeah!!
OK, so let's troubleshoot this.
I reconnected the keyboard to the front USB connector, then reconnected the Bose in the rear. I had to reselect the Bose USB Audio as the Output device using System Preferences/Sound/Output. So far, so good.
Now connect the Drobo, still powered off. Still no problems.
Ok, plug the keyboard in directly, not using the hub.
Still no problem. Ok, now plug the keyboard in using the hub, in case I want to add another device.
Now I'm back to the original configuration, although some of the plugs may not have been inserted in the same slots. Yet everything is still working with no dropouts!
At this point, I don't know what is going on. Was it a loose/intermittent cable, or did reassigning the Output port make a difference.
Stay tuned -- more tomorrow night, after more testing.