According to Allt om Mac, several people have experienced problems with Macs using their optical audio out port or HDMI with OS X 10.6.8 installed.
![mac_mini_media](http://www.mactrast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/mac_mini_media.jpeg)
People are reporting that the audio completely drops out occasionally and only a full reboot will solve the issue. This issue seems to happen a lot to users having their Mac Minis as media centers.
A thread in the Apple Support Communities is very active around the issue and Apple seem to have noticed the issue but whether or not we’ll see an OS X update soon, only Jobs knows. Probably.