I think this may have worked…
Found the following on the web after experiencing rare dropouts – small chops – in audio. I think it may have just happened again….one time. I dunno. Linux is always kinda buggy.
Can you run
sudo nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
Add the following lines, or if they are present, uncomment them by removing the hashtag (#) in front of them:
high-priority = yes
nice-level = -15
default-sample-rate = 48000
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 10