Is there a mixer program for your SB? Usually it's called MIXERSET. Maybe the balance is shifted / left channel is muted specifically for CD audio?

Also make sure you've got the right DOS drivers for your specific card, quite often you find one that looks like it works then get strange issues like this happening

turns out the sony atapi_cd.sys driver i had grabbed from my 95b bootdisk was to blame, when i replace this with oakcdrom.sys from the net cd audio works fine in dos. could be a corrupted file or some incompatibility with this version of mscdex i also grabbed from the bootdisk, it says 2.25 even though it's claimed on the net that 2.96 is the newest version, included with win95.

also the ct2290 doesn't need any drivers in dos, normally you'd initialize it with diagnose.exe /s but when rebooting to dos it just keeps the config from win95.

i have recently found the final version of this sony ATAPI driver with a proper changelog, which is 2.27b, along with some later one loading as version "GEN", which dell dates 2000 and calls 1.0/A01 for 32x drives, though the driver file itself is dated 1998. download links:

http://bbs.actapricot.org/files/area41/atapi.exe
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drive … driverid=r19556

oddly, the atapi.exe package is missing the correct readme file, but it's here. this says that 2.27b added support for enhanced mode CDs, which mixed-mode CDs like DOS games seem to fall under, so i was hopeful this would resolve the issue. however, with both of these files, it's still only playing music on the left channel. tested this with an original shadow warrior cd on a CDU55E drive and ensured there is no problem in the AWE64's mixer.

this is a pretty bizarre issue to not have CD audio working on the final version of a major vendor's driver. i have noticed that the atapi.exe file includes corel's MSCDEX replacement and old posts suggest that apparently, you want to be on older versions of MSCDEX for DOS games. i'm always using 2.25 from win9x so my only guess is that this is the problem here, as i have already speculated in my old posts.

edit: i've obtained MSCDEX 2.23 from this link, which also contains a version history. i have tried this and also the CORELCDX from that atapi.exe archive. neither changed anything, getting only music from the left speaker that is crackling on top of that. then i load oakcdrom.sys and everything works fine.

calling anyone with a sony drive to test this, because it just seems impossible the sony driver could be this broken on two of their drives.