I think you should just forget the Roland card and give it to me. 😉

Have you done anything with the DOS sbmixer program to set levels? It might have microphone on, plus output to low. What DOS settings are you using to initialize the card?

The only caps I have had to replace are the metal aluminum analytics. The older styles eem to last forever (well outside of a tantalum one blowing up one in a decade).

Check to make sure the amplifier circuit is working before messing with the caps.

I recommend posting this question in the Badcaps forum. We had a member there not too long ago that had experience with this.

But the short answer is that yes, these cards absolutely need re-capping. Creative used low quality capacitors most of the time, and looking at the datecodes on the caps of my own SB16 (CT2230), they are from very early 1994, which would make the caps around 20 years old now.

^ so what caps are recommended for soundcard use? You can't just replace all with audio-grade one since some are used for decoupling and other reasons, right?

I'm suspicious that you're either having a driver issue or you have one of the volume sliders maladjusted and don't know it... did you mention which version of windows you're running? I didn't see that info in your post. The last time I went to recap my SB16, it was still pretty loud, and it had been sitting for over 10 years. After I recapped it with low-impedance caps, including the ones on the powered output from the OpAmp, it was MUCH louder, like I could only turn it up to the first notch in WinXP before it was ridiculous, louder.

But I find it hard to believe that your caps are the reason the card is quiet. What are you outputting your SB16 to?

keropi wrote:

^ so what caps are recommended for soundcard use? You can't just replace all with audio-grade one since some are used for decoupling and other reasons, right?

Yes, you can use all audio-grade caps, but audio-grade caps are a complete waste of money. And yes, you can use pretty much any electrolytic capacitor, as long it's from a quality manufacturer. An electrolytic cap is an electrolytic cap, and they all work the same way, regardless of what they're being used for.

What I'd recommend though is to stay away from the general purpose series capacitors and use something like:

Panasonic: FC series or better (FM, FR, FK)
United Chemi-Con: LXZ or better (KZE, KZH, KZM, KZN, KY, KYA, KYB)
Nichicon: PM/PS/PV/PW or better (HC, HD, HE, HV, SV, TS, TT)
Rubycon: YXF or better (YXG, YXH, YXJ, YXM, ZL, ZLG, ZLH, ZLJ, ZLK, ZLS)

I may have left out a few, but you get the idea.

The only exception to this is bi-polar caps. I always see them on modems, but never on sound cards. I read over at Badcaps that all bi-polar caps eventually polarize, but I'm not sure how that works exactly. That being said, if you have a BP cap on yuor sound card, you should replace it with a BP cap.

ah, so the low-esr chemicon KZH/KYA/etc are fine for this... nice for me 😁
I've only seen bipolar caps on Roland cards, my LAPC-I has a couple of them...
thanks for the info mockingbird

I seriously doubt Creative using that high quality parts for the boards originally anyway 😀

^ yeah it's true... My CT1350B has some ELGEN caps and I checked the 2230 too , don't know what they are but they are cheap.
On the other hand my GUS classic uses Nichicon caps , the SCC-1 and LAPC-I use SANYO and Panasonic ones... even by looking at them you see the difference in quality 🤣

Runicen wrote:

I had been using a Yamaha Audician via the same setup and had pretty decent luck with it once I figured out how to set the jumpers to disable the onboard amp and render the output a line out. Unfortunately, though the SB16 has a slightly smaller memory footprint, the signal I'm getting from it - either line out or speaker out - is dirty and incredibly low in level.

Memory footprint? The main initializers for YMF-719/OPL3-SAx and SB16 soundcards do not stay resident.

Don't swap caps that aren't known to leak or have gone bad 🙁

mockingbird wrote:

The only exception to this is bi-polar caps. I always see them on modems, but never on sound cards. I read over at Badcaps that all bi-polar caps eventually polarize, but I'm not sure how that works exactly. That being said, if you have a BP cap on yuor sound card, you should replace it with a BP cap.

Bi-polar electrolytics are usually two polarized caps put together internally, so its doubtful they polarize over time. They are also used in many audio applications, particularly amplifiers.

mockingbird wrote:

The only exception to this is bi-polar caps. I always see them on modems, but never on sound cards. I read over at Badcaps that all bi-polar caps eventually polarize, but I'm not sure how that works exactly. That being said, if you have a BP cap on yuor sound card, you should replace it with a BP cap.

Actually there's a handful of soundcards and synths with bipolar capacitors in the outputs. For electrolytics, yeah, you have to polarized capacitors inside facing one another to simulate bi-polarity (that is not the case with film, glass or ceramic afaik).

The MT-32 for instance uses bipolars on its output (to give reference that many here are familiar with). Some spec sheets for a few ICs that Creative uses call for bi-polar, but they're too cheap to add them.

I replaced the capacitors on all the incoming power traces of my Sound Blaster Live with Panasonic FM's or FC's, and it was much quieter--the sound was more black. Then I replaced the caps in the signal path between the EMU10K and the output opamps with mylar films, and the sound was ridiculously improved--night and day difference.

I had a better look on my CT2230: it uses mostly Chemi-Con capacitors except the 10uf (7 pieces) , 47uf (2 pieces) that are wincaps and the 2x 470uf ELGEN ones

edit: you can't be sure, for example my 2nd CT2230 uses Chemi-Cons at the 10uf and 470uf places, ELGENs at 4.7uf ones... basically a mix depending on what they had available 😐

Runicen wrote:

(...) Unfortunately, though the SB16 has a slightly smaller memory footprint(...)

😕 😕 😕 😕 😕 😕

here is a relevant picture, I had to replace one of the big 470uf caps so I just replaced all wincap/elgens with chemi-con/panasonics, 11 caps in total - left the old chemi-cons alone 😈

Not that we all like to be this nit-picky, but when dealing with capacitors that are on the input/output channels, it's always good to buy a handful of whatever value they are and then run a meter on them all to pick a pair which are as closely matched in value as possible so the theoretical output levels will be comparable. (They are 20% tolerance so in the worst case scenario you could have two 470uF caps, one with 564uF and the other with 376uF. YUCK!)

Wow... This thread gained a life of its own while I was away. Sorry for the lack of reply. It's been a busy 36 or so hours.

With regard to the questions about memory, keep in mind that I grew up on DOS but I'm dusting off synapses for a lot of the stuff I'm setting up now as I haven't touched a DOS-based system in over a decade, so I may be completely off-base with my stuff here.

That said, my "memory" experience with the Yamaha came from trying to get the CD-ROM version of Interplay's "Lord of the Rings" game running. And, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the problem with memory wasn't the Yamaha. The LotR simply didn't like the card and would freeze and crash when I tried to utilize it. At the time, I only had the Yamaha and a Sound Blaster Audigy 1 if memory serves, so I was using the incredibly memory-greedy drivers that came with IT and it simply ate too much for the Interplay game to even launch. So that was my mistake entirely.

Getting back to the electronics question, tonight I'll see about the autoexec and config lines I'm using to initialize the SB16. I'll also check the SBMixer program, but all of these are fresh from a new install direct from the Creative discs that came with the card and I haven't tampered with any settings. That made my assumption that the volume drop was down to hardware the obvious first choice (to me anyway).

As for what I'm running into, it's this:

http://www.akaipro.com/product/eiepro

I run a stereo miniplug to stereo RCA cable from the Line Out (presently, the Speaker Out because it's the only way to get a usable level from the thing) of the sound card to the 3rd and 4th inputs of the Akai. With the Yamaha card, it was CRANKED if I had the pre-amps on those inputs at 12 O'Clock. With the SB16, I have to max out the pre-amps if I don't want to max the volume of the unit. That was the main point I found strange. Likewise, the MIDI playback (which is presumably coming from the Roland daughterboard) is quieter still.

Like I said, I'll double-check my software before hard-lining on it being down to the card itself. That said, even what I DO get out of it has a fair level of crackle and distortion - though it's listenable. I saw a post further up the thread that changing caps can clean up the output signal. Is it worth undertaking for that reason alone?

Oh, and before I forget to mention it, this machine only has MS-DOS 6.22 installed. I don't (yet) have a Windows installation, but I'll probably opt for 98 when I do.

Hope that helps to clarify what I'm working with.