Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Electrical gremlins interfere with music playback?

My music files have been stuttering during playback.

I've been migrating data to new HDDs and doing lots of cloning (full 4Tb drives). I thought I was having end of life problems with the DAC is use between my iMac and my amplifier. The mp3 files kept cutting out, frequently for just a nanosecond, but enough to make the music unlistenable.

I went through every element, including moving the DAC to my living room and a different amplifier. Everything worked fine on the other amp. Music to the computer amp played via the headphone jack plays fine, so the amp's okay.

Playing music via the internal speaker works fine at any time, as do bluetooth ear buds.

Okay, the short story: the music plays fine, as long as I am not doing any copying of files. All the drives are connected by USB, as is the DAC. So, some sort of interference, I guess. I have some magnetic clips that will encircle cables and wonder if sticking one on each USB cable might help?

Any ideas what's going on here? Solutions?

Thanks.