DonutKing wrote:

There's not much you can do about this. I've got the same issue with multiple systems, and no amount of recapping, swapping PSU's or moving slots seems to resolve it.

I'd suggest a later model Creative card that doesn't suffer from this issue - CT2800 or CT2900 if you want real OPL3, or an AWE64 Gold. Or a non-creative card.

I understand how you feel, but I think you may be throwing around the idea that you've tried everything, loosely because I HAVE built a system with a recapped PSU, motherboard and SB16, and I didn't have this noise issue on the powered nor line-level channels, , and I used headphones.

Everyone should keep in mind that capacitors only have an idle life of around 15 years, or so the story goes, and this could account for oscillations and such which people are referring to as "noise."

What model SB16 did you use?

Ive also recapped psu's, motherboards and sound cards, but none of them seem to help with my SB pro.
Swap to a later SB16 vibra or a different brand card and the noise goes away.

Love that "computer thinking" noise! 😜

I've noticed that the analogue CD-audio cable acts as a nice antenna for picking up RF within the computer case and injecting it right in to the sound card. I noticed a decent improvement by swapping that out for the digital variant when I used to use my old CT2740.

The CD-Audio and PC speaker cables will increase the noise a lot.

I now mix the CD-Audio signal externally through a mixer to have a cleaner signal.

Mute all inputs that aren't needed.

I found the AWE64 Gold very quiet. "Alternative" cards are often much quieter compared to Creative. For example ESS Audiodrive or Yamaha cards like the Audacian. The Sound Blaster Pro 2 is also quite good.

Worst are the old Sound Blaster cards like the 1.5 or the 2.0.

But every system is different. You could also have issues with the cables. When capturing I used to have a "grounding issue" or whatever it was called. Using a decent recording card (X-Fi Titanium) fixed this however.

I also agree with DK that a missing OPL3 is not such a big deal. Most games, apart from the really old ones, support MIDI one way or another.

On a DX2-66 pretty much all games from that era supported MIDI.

DonutKing wrote:

What model SB16 did you use?

Ive also recapped psu's, motherboards and sound cards, but none of them seem to help with my SB pro.
Swap to a later SB16 vibra or a different brand card and the noise goes away.

That may account for it, then. I used a 2770.