Hi everyone. I had a defective SB32 in my possesion for a while. The problem was the left channel have not been working at all even though the sound was fine otherwise. The first thing I tried was to replace caps around the amplifier but without success. Then I assumed that the amplifier chip itself could be defective so I removed it and put a socket in it's place and then bought another amplifier. That's when my problem started - upon starting a computer with the card in it I could hear very loud screeches and static noise. The card itself stopped working, at least the Sound Blaster part, the CQM still works. Tried line out (to be sure that the new amplifier is not defective too) but no luck. I have probably thermaly damaged something as I had problem with desoldering amplifier pins on a big ground plane that basically functioned as a small heatsink. The worst thing is that after all that I found out that the problem with a non working channel was broken trace under speaker out jack! Stupid me.

I am attaching an OGG file with the screeches, maybe somebody will recognize them. The UNISOUND recongnizes the card fine but Wolf3D shows only Adlib functionality, Duke3D plays CQM music and Descent refuses to work at all. The screeches are very unpredictable, sometimes it takes several minutes for them to occur.

What could I do? Big capacitors are fine but I'm not sure about the small one around amplifier. I could damage something else further away from the chip as the ground plane is rather big and is reaching almost to the middle parts of the card. I'm sure it's not easy to help without checking the card personally but maybe someone has an experience with something similar. I would be very happy if I could save the card. Thanks for any advice!