Soooo,

I've owned the HDSPE MADI for a few years now. I use the pcie card with my Antelope Orion 32+ Gen3, in a hackintosh running OSX Mojave 10.14.6.  This configuration has been super stable for me until just recently. I began to have dropouts and glitches (clicks and pops, etc.) on occasion, it originally felt like it was cpu dependent, then it began to get worse.  Until yesterday, when It started happening every 20-30 seconds. i checked the back of the card, and it seems that the error light was blinking from green to red intermittently. in the HDSPe settings window, the Syncheck for Madi was switching from "sync" to "Lock" to "No Lock". when the problems first started, it used to stay on "sync" and occasionally go to "lock". And since the issue got more frequent, it only goes from "lock" to "no lock" now.  When it goes to "No Lock", the input status area also drops blank with no channels or 48K frame or sample rate shown for a second and then goes back.

I suspected it was a madi cable issue or something with the optical connectors, so i tried to use my dust cleaner to blow off the connectors, and this seemed to have made the problem slightly worse, as in the light flashes more frequently and the "lock" "no Lock" toggles more often.  This has essentially rendered my card useless, as i it drops audio constantly.  I ordered another madi cable and also a fiber optic cleaner tool to clean the optical connectors on the back of the card. And hopefully one of these will fix the issue.  But I was wondering if this was maybe a similar issue someone elese has dealt with.

Is it possible that this is an issue with the optical connectors on the back of the card? or is this a problem potentially within the card itself?

Would using the BNC Connectors with BNC cables from my orion to the HDSPe card be a better solution?

I will be receiving the new madi cable and cleaner on monday, so I'll be able to test if its just an issue with my present cable, but I'm leaning to believing its not that, since the cable is pretty new, and well taken care of and tucked away. And was working flawlessly before this.

This for obvious reasons feels very much like a connection issue to me, but also may be a failing card?

Any help would be amazing... This is a major part of my studio's workflow, and i need to get this back up and running as quickly as possible.

Thanks in advance!

for added information:

I have updated to all the latest drivers (4.17) and flashed the card to the latest rev. 33.
I've tried both setting the HDSPe clock mode to Autosync (which i've previously been using for years) and also as the master clock.
In Pref Sync ref, I have it set to MADI, so that its slaved to the Orion clock. and when I tried the HDSPe as the master clock i changed this to word clock.
I run with 64 ch. out, but also tried to set it with 56.
Word Clock Out is set to single speed.
MADI in is set to optical.