Audio waveform causing choppy playback

Having issues with nearly all Premiere cc 2014 (8.1) timelines where playback with audio track expanded to show waveform causes bad, choppy playback. As soon as i collapse the audio track playback is perfect. Not very useful when cutting interviews and needing to see waveforms.
Running a late 2013 mac pro 3.5ghz 6 core intel xeon e5 32gb ram all footage stored on a lacie 6tb thunderbolt.
Any fixes or help appreciated
Thanks

Everything's on the internal drive - a 320 gig 7200 rpm WD. Still has ~120 gigs free. The thing that's really getting me is that when I unplug the USB audio adapter, the video playback is fine.
There is an external drive for TM backups, but I just unplugged that to see if it was part of the issue and it doesn't seem to change anything.

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Audio waveform causing choppy playback

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