Chosen Solution
Sound starts to crackle on audio out after 30 minutes. If I switch to optical out it works better but still occurs. I have eliminated the Nvidia Shield as the source by trying another shield; And it works over Bluetooth to my sound bar save the shield disconnects after 35 minutes. I am using hdmi and have try both sources. I haven’t try composite in yet. Which part could it be? Any suggestions on how to ‘fixit’.
Solutions is that it was not the TV but background processes running on the Nvidia Shield. I believe it has something to do with Google Play Music. If I had to guess it was some sort of race condition or memory leak so I disabled Google Play Music on the shield and the problem has since gone away. Here’s some more details. The model is one of the Samsung 58" 1080p 60Hz/120CMR LED Smart TVs. I was getting ready to take the tv apart when the android TV in my parent’s bedroom started exhibiting the same issue. I went to the running tasks and noticed that google play music was running on that box and my parents don’t really use it. So I disabled it in the app settings and proceeded to try the same thing with 58’ setup; and low and behold, it worked. I don’t have the same problem with my Shield so I assumed that is an issue with my elderly parents searching for stuff and starting up google music by mistake and after a while it would just take up enough resources to cause the digital audio issues. With that said, the Google Play Music app was not behaving properly. While the Bluetooth would work fine for about 35 minutes; It would always lose connection after that and require a restart. I believed that too to be a bug with the NVIDIA Shield android; So I am planing on testing to see if that still occurs. I will update this answer if the Bluetooth audio disconnection issue is fixed as well. So it turned out that it was a back ground processing issue on the shield and I have been tightening up the shield by either deleting or disabling unused sources. I do keep the shield up to day on firmware but guess I need to tighten it down more and simplify the settings for my parents.
