Asus G73JH Laptop audio dropout occurring at complete random, help!

I have been experiencing an audio dropout from time to time, most recently a week ago. It happens on my home theater setup and when it does, lasts for a good two seconds or so. Now, my setup is a little bit involved, so please bear with me.

I am running an Asus G73JH gaming laptop through HDMI on my Samsung LN46A650 television using the television as both my monitor and speakers. Now, my television is connected via optical to the audio console of my Panasonic SA-PT960 5.1 home theater all-in-one, with wireless speakers in the rear.

Now as for the specifics of the incident, I was running a video on my laptop to play on my television. It was an .m4v video file being played in Media Player Classic 64-bit Edition. By the way, I am running Windows 7 64-bit. It may also be worth noting that I have a 3-way optical splitter, so that could have something to do with it, but not likely in my informed opinion. Now, this is my biggest lead so far, but at the time that this happened I was using Nero burning software to burn the same video onto a DVD that I happened to be playing in the media player. I don't know how often or likely it is that audio dropouts can derive from burning software, but I imagine it's quite possible when you're playing the same video that you're burning, simultaneously. Anyways, food for thought.

The dropout took place a few minutes into the video file and as I mentioned earlier, it lasts a good two seconds, more or less. This same duration fits a similar audio dropout I encountered about a month ago, but I had a different source running; cable box via component. (Could the problem perhaps lie with the TV itself?)

I have mentally exhausted all possibilities but as I mentioned earlier, this problem does not happen as frequently as I would like, so I can't really test different solutions that often. That being said, just a few days ago I did update my television's firmware, and Samsung televisions have been known to resolve various audio issues through software updates. Also, I switched HDMI cables, perhaps eluding the problem to a faulty cable. The problem hasn't happened since but if I know my setup as well as I do, it will likely happen again.

Does anyone have some concrete insight into this nastily vague conundrum? I apologize for how cryptic I made it out to be, but it's one of the single most perplexing issues I've ever encountered.

Thanks for any help.

 

I wouldn't worry about it. The audio dropouts may have been caused by overall system latency.

 

If I can at the very least narrow the problem down to the peripheral itself, I can at least rest a little easier. As it stands, I don't even know if it's the TV causing it, the sound system, or even the computer. If I only knew where to start, I could feel a little better about this problem but I feel like the problem could derive from anywhere at this point.

As an estimated guess, what would you say is the most probable component to be causing the dropout?

 

I'd blame one of the cables on the splitter or the splitter itself.

 

I was thinking it was the splitter, it's very likely. But again, I really have no definite way of knowing; it's problems like these I wish would occur far more frequently!

These particular dropouts are so infrequent (You may be wondering why it even bothers me, then) that every incremental step I take in potentially resolving this will require great periods of waiting time to determine if it's truly been fixed or not.

All I can say is.... OCD really does suck. sigh*

 

Since you have said it dropped out from another source that says it's probably the one factor in common there, either the splitter or a cable.