I have only had this set up for a week or two, but I have the mid 2015 rmbp and thunderbolt display. When itunes or safari is playing, it seems to be fine for hours. If I am playing a game, sometimes, it will garble the audio that is resolved by switching the audio source from the display and back. I don't have any flickering issue, or anything like that, just the periodic distorted choppy audio. Any ideas?
Same here. Have a 27er TBD connected to a Mac mini Mid 2015. Sounds run perfectly for a couple of hours, then it starts garbling and getting worser and worser. Reconnecting the display solves the issue, but is annoying. Any ideas?
Same problem here with early 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13". Thunderbolt display is practically useless for the audio - distortion is coming always after 1-5 minutes of using audio on display.
Actually I've bought two thunderbolt displays in two weeks and it is same on both of them, so I suppose it is some kind of software issue.
Apple, PLEASE, SOLVE THIS ISSUE!
I think that I have solved this. I ran several pinned tabs on Safari in 10.11.1. If you had say, facebook or hangouts.google.com, and the system went to sleep, when you wake the system up sometimes audio would be held open by Safari in one of those tabs. You can tell because the audio icon on the URL bar in safari is present but no audio is playing. When I see this icon, I can close and reopen the tab to release whatever is held open in the audio. I have yet to have this distortion reappear and it would happen within 10 minutes of playing a video game before.
I have opened a bug reporting this to apple, but I *think* it's a coreaudio bug, and not a thunderbolt display issue (at least in my case).
Periodic audio distortion
