AU lab giving me a hard time

Hi Guys,

Every time I open AU lab on my macbook pro(late 2011), I get a loud and annoying static noise. Any ideas? It only happens when I'm running the Audio Engine. If the application is open but the engine is paused there's no interference. It only started doing this recently, I've been using it for about a year now as a system equalizer because I found the one in iTunes rather "empty" and I also wanted to use it for netflix and listening to spotify etc.

Thanks