Audio dropouts: "clipIfNecessary" Console messages

[I mistakenly posted this in the "Mountain Lion" community but the forum software refused to let me move the message to the Mavericks forum ("you are not authorized")! It also refused to let me delete the message (this was about one minute after I posted it – so here it is again, in the correct community!]

I know there are a few questions regarding this issue already up here but there are no definitive (or close to definitive) answers yet so think of this as a bump. I'm a musician making my living playing gigs with a laptop rig. I've been doing this very successfully with three different laptops over the last almost nine years – until now. My current laptop is a 15" Retina MBP (late 2013). I'll be playing and suddenly the audio will drop out entirely or turn to fuzz. This only lasts about a second or two, then it comes back. It's very intermittent which makes the troubleshooting almost impossible. I can go three or four gigs with perfect audio. When it does happen it tends to only happen once per gig. I make a note of the time, then check the system log in Console and always see hundreds (sometimes over 1200) of these same messages at the exact time the audio broke up:

kernel[0] IOAudioStream[0xffffff801eb25800]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (5c5f,3aa8)->(5c60,3fa4).

kernel[0] IOAudioStream[0xffffff801eb25800]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (5c60,3aa8)

The exact memory locations change of course. The time stamps for each message are the same, or within a second – they are flooding the log. Just to make things more interesting, I've seen these messages in the log after a gig where I heard no audible issues! In those cases though, there were less of them. So it looks like it's the kind of issue that becomes audible only when there are very many of these message generated at the same time. I am using the onboard audio (optical)– not an external audio interface.

I've been all over Google looking for any kind of clue as to what's causing this. What I remember is that with 10.9.0 things were OK – or, I didn't hear any dropouts. I believe this may have started with the 10.9.2 update. I'm at 10.9.4 now.

There are no real clues in the console log – I was hoping to see a message about some process starting up right before the audio dropout, but there are none.

This message is already in "tl;dr" territory so I'll just add that I've already tried quite a few things, short of rolling back to 10.9.0, which I'm not sure I could even do. Setting up a fresh account is something I started doing but bailed on because it took me down a rabbit hole of re-authorizing software, and permissions issues with setup files. From looking at the logs, this problem is happening at the kernel level anyway – I'm not sure running from another account would be a viable thing to try. I'll just end with this – I am using an almost identical software setup I used on a 2007 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo w/10.6.8) with zero issues. A 2-second dropout is not that big a deal when I'm playing a gig at the local club, but I'm doing some touring, playing on big stages in front of quite a few people. I'm disappointed that I may have to resort to playing rental keyboards in that situation.

If anyone has any tips on how to troubleshoot this, I'm all ears. Thanks!!