Occasional audio 'pop' using analog output

Question

When watching a movie and hooked up to my fairly large speakers, the audio will give an occasional "pop". Now, this doesn't happen too often, but in the course of a long movie, it may happen two or three times. I don't seem to encounter this problem with headphones on. Now, is this a problem of the computer, or the speakers themselves?

Answer 1

Is there a Terminal command ("defaults write" ...) that disables the automatic shutdown of the sound circuit after a period of audio inactivity?
As a workaround, I made this AppleScript applet to play a silent sound file every 20 seconds, but sometimes the applet suddenly starts hogging the CPU and I have to quit it. It's an AppleScript thing, not this particular code, because I have a couple of other idle handlers that also suddenly start hogging the CPU, but I digress.
I would rather put a stop to the auto-audio-cutoff in the first place. (It's supposed to save battery power, but there's no reason for it when plugged-in to AC. It wouldn't really matter except for the "pop" from the speakers.)
on idle
    do shell script "afplay '/Users/[user]/Library/Sounds/Silentium.aif'"
    return 20 -- (Execute this idle handler once every twenty seconds.)
end idle