diff --git a/ovos_audio/playback.py b/ovos_audio/playback.py
index da54a9d..c811f0b 100644
--- a/ovos_audio/playback.py
+++ b/ovos_audio/playback.py
@@ -197,8 +197,6 @@ def run(self, cb=None):
         while not self._terminated:
             while self._paused:
                 sleep(0.2)
-            if self.queue.empty():
-                continue
             try:
                 # HACK: we do these check to account for direct usages of TTS.queue singletons
                 speech_data = self.queue.get(timeout=2)