How to avoid audio clipping when using SAY command in AppleScript?

When "say" command is used in AppleScript it seems the audio channel is asleep because the beginning of the word always gets clipped. Subsequent words are find but after a few minutes the audio channel goes into some hibernation mode and the problem happens again. I've tried various things with various success such as:

say "?"
say "something"

But still the result is not good. Has anyone come up with a solution to this problem?