It could very well be the caps, I've had the ones on the output do that to me.

First though does your sound card have an amplified output/ any jumpers to turn on/off the built in amplifier (if present)? If so disable it and see if it changes anything since usually this will bypass the amplifier altogether.

I have seen a few cheap ess based cards that inexplicably have the output Jack wired in such a way that when your cable is disconnected they will actually short out signal to ground -this may either be a PCB error or due to using the wrong type of jack because it was cheaper or something. Needless to say this scenario is really hard on the amplifier IC and the output caps, makes me wonder how many cards suffered an untimely death because of that

bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-11-19, 07:03:

It could very well be the caps, I've had the ones on the output do that to me.

First though does your sound card have an amplified output/ any jumpers to turn on/off the built in amplifier (if present)? If so disable it and see if it changes anything since usually this will bypass the amplifier altogether.

I have seen a few cheap ess based cards that inexplicably have the output Jack wired in such a way that when your cable is disconnected they will actually short out signal to ground -this may either be a PCB error or due to using the wrong type of jack because it was cheaper or something. Needless to say this scenario is really hard on the amplifier IC and the output caps, makes me wonder how many cards suffered an untimely death because of that

Thank you and I'll have a check of the card this week and maybe just try recapping it versus buying another. I think it has the jumpers to set the output to be unamplified but I may be thinking of my Yamaha card in another machine