Suddeny my ESS Audiodrive starts to make scratching / cracking sounds instead of giving me Soundblaster SFX. Well I still do here Soundblaster SFX but the scratching has the upper hand. I understood genuine soundblasters could have this problem but an ESS ? It happened after reinstalling my 486slc machine. I have a dreamblaster on the card that works fine at the same time in Doom. It also happens with the SFX in Dune2 / sampled sfx . Adlib in Prince sounds fine.

People suggest it's an IRQ problem so I disabled the IDE of the ESS card, tried both IRQ 5 and 7 with both DMA 0 and 1 . Other DMA channels result in no SFX at all and a single time ( 1 out of 40 reboots ) it actually works like intended.

I am kind of out of ideas.