Sound stops working intermittently

[fuumind]

Both my laptops got a clean install of elementary OS Loki a few months ago. Following the install both systems started having intermittent audio drops, as in suddenly audio playback stops working. I've checked with multiple applications including Noise, VLC, Audacious, mplayer, etc. Applications allready running when this occurs can still play audio but any application started afterwards will malfunction.

Checking the audio system settings when this happens, the list of audio devices is empty. Normally the internal audio card is listed.

Restarting pulseaudio using:

 killall pulseaudio && pulseaudio --start

brings the internal audio card back to the list of devices and I can once again listen to music and watch videos, that is until the bug resurfaces again at some later time.

Have attached the output from

 cat /var/log/syslog* | grep -i pulse