appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-24, 11:44:

I have a CT1740, and it has an issue with the volume potentiometer. There is no sound on the right channel unless I wiggle/tilt the potentiometer until there is. I'm guessing some oxidation is at work here, should I just spray some contact cleaner and be done? Or should I completely replace the potentiometer? I have one left over from back when I built a Snark Barker, but I'm not sure it should be necessary..

Ir doesn't hurt to try and apply contact cleaner. If it fails, you can still replace it. Or solder in two fixed resistors, if you know what volume you would like to output. 😀

Contact cleaner will likely do the trick.

Alternatively, if you're not directly driving a pair of passive speakers from the SB16, consider configuring the card for line output instead. By doing so, the volume wheel becomes irrelevant, and the output quality benefits as well.

I removed the plastic knob and sprayed a good deal of contact cleaner into the pot (as well as the jacks) and it works quite well now.

One thing I noticed is that this CT1740 is not the noise blaster that these models are usually infamous for being. It has a pretty comparable noise floor to my CT2290. What gives, I wonder?

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-26, 07:56:

What gives, I wonder?

People echoing each other, anecdotal evidence, among others?
I have used quite a lot of hardware in my life, and the CT1740 that I own now is among the less noisier of what I have experienced.
Are there more quite Sound Blasters? Yeah. Probably.
But if I set the volume of my head phones to a normal level, the noise cannot match the ambient noise and the noise of the retro pc. Let alone when I use speakers and am able to hear the pc directly.
It may be a concern to someone if you want to record the actual output of such a Sound Blaster with professional studio gear to then use that recording in a audiophile listening room at thunderous levels. But why would anyone want to do that?