Gradually choppier audio until I restart?

I experienced this problem under Lion, and upgrading to 10.8.2 hasn't fixed it:
The longer I leave my Mac running without a restart, the choppier my audio performance gets. I'm talking Logic, I'm talking Spotify, I'm talking any audio at all. Freshly restarted, it's absolutely fine, but from anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour after restarting, the audio begins becoming more and more choppy. Sometimes it'll come on suddenly, sometimes it'll gradually get worse over an hour or so. Either way, the audio being recorded suffers from the same choppiness, so if I play something back that was recorded choppily after a restart, it remains choppy.
I have a Focusrite Saffire PRO 14 (Firewire) audio interface, but I've been through some stuff with their support and have completely removed the Saffire (hardware, software, everything), and the issue is still occurring with the built-in speakers and microphone on my iMac (which is a 27" i7 2.93GHz model, with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, from early 2011).
I've tried creating a new user account, which has not solved the issue, it occurs on the new account, too. I've also tried trashing all audio-related preferences and plists, and resetting the PRAM and SMC. I've looked for weird processes in Activity Monitor and haven't found anything suspicious or sucking up excessive amounts of CPU or RAM.
Any ideas what's happening here? How can I fix the issue? I really don't want to have to completely wipe the machine clean and re-install everything if possible, that's one of those old Windows annoyances I'd left behind..

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ElectroSpyzz wrote:
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Gradually choppier audio until I restart?

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