This is a recording taken of me listening to music on the Thunderbolt Display (via its internal speakers) while writing a couple hundred gigabytes to the Pegasus R6. Note the introduction of what can only be described as really bad noise at the 6 second marker.
If you stop music playback and quickly resume, the problem will still be there. You have to restart the application that's using the audio codec to recover from this point. From a hardware standpoint, the codec just needs to go through an off/on (sleep/wake?) cycle to return back to normal. If you do this however and haven't stopped the transfer, the problem will creep up again. Stopping the transfer while playing back music won't fix the issue either. You have to stop the transfer and restart the music playback application for it to go away.
Total System Power FireWire 800 USB 2.0 (stick) USB 2.0 (SSD)
crapple Thunderbolt Display 70.0 MB/s 14.1 MB/s 16.4 MB/s
crapple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2011) 72.0 MB/s 21.2 MB/s 32.2 MB/s
...casini con la riproduzione audio...performance dimezzate con le usb del monitor...nessuna uscita audio per migliorare le performance degli speaker integrati...numero di porte usb scarso...assenza del 3.0...bel monitor tuttofare...tuttofare male...