audio drops during editing

While editing a multicam project with 7-8 cameras, each with the same audio tracks, I've been having major issues with audio playback while reviewing progress in the timeline. The sound will drop out during playback, but will resume if I pause and restart playback.

This is one of the biggest projects I've edited so I'm inclined to think the issue is tied to having 16gb of ram on a Macbook Pro. Each camera is a single file with more than an hour of prores video with multiple audio tracks. I'm doing a multicam edit on 7-8 of the files at a time. Would it have helped to have each camera file broken into shorter files? Can't change that now I suspect. I've done too much work on each project. The video itself only occasionally reports dropping frames. The audio problems seem to get worse the farther into the project I get, but that is just anecdotal. I have avoided launching other apps as I have run out of memory when I do.

I have more than 100gb free on my internal SSD, and on the external TB2 hard drive. It's a striped raid. The files for the project overall are 3TB (four projects with 7-8 cameras each).

Contemplating renting/buying a desktop with more RAM, or at least toting the drive to the Apple Store to see if I can test it on an iMac or Mac Pro.