I think my sound card is dying. Advice please?

[winninganthem]

Hey everyone,

When I got home from work tonight I turned on iTunes on my Early '08 Penryn MBP, but right after it played a couple of songs, the song would pause by itself and my speakers make a popping noise. After a couple of seconds it would start playing the song again, but then it would repeat doing this over and over again.

I quit iTunes and my speakers were still giving a popping sound. I opened up a Youtube video just to test if the problem was isolated to iTunes. To my surprise, the intermittent pausing and playing accompanied by a speaker pop was also present in Youtube. After awhile, the video would continue to play, but the sound would be completely dead.

At the moment, my sound works again, but I still hear speaker pops at least once every 10 seconds or so.

This is what leads me to believe it is a hardware issue. I have a couple of questions:

Has anyone ever heard of or experienced this issue? Everyone talks about graphics card failures with the early '08 MBP model, but I haven't seen anything about audio pops and random pausing.

What might have caused this? I'm pretty puzzled.

Any other thoughts? All responses are appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Repo]

I had this same problem once, but with a Windows PC. Turned out to be a hardware problem. My MOBO's sound card slowly died over a year, so I had to get a PCI sound card. Worked great. Your MBP is early '08, do you still have the 1 year Apple Care? Did you buy a 3 year Apple Care? Take it in for repair if you can.