The direct cable from the CD drive to the sound card is only used for playing audio CDs, so that shouldn't be a factor.
Is the Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play? Is the 3Com Ethernet card? Can you give the i/o port settings and IRQs of both.
Any other ISA cards?
Wikipedia alludes to capacitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_1 … _quality_issues

Might be a resource conflict, or a faulty card, I've had to replace capacitors on my CT 2950, but it was more low / poor audio output than the issues you describe.

Are you using drivers installed by the DOS 7.10 installer? Do you have the bios and resources configured? for example nothing else sharing the same IRQ / DMA etc?

if the SC2kSE intro video is having issues it might be the DVD drive itself that's either too fast or on it's way out if it loads the video data directly from disc.

The CT2940 is a PnP card, yeah - CTCM is called in autoexec with the /t switch to let it run in DOS 7.1, since it thinks I'm running Win95. The 3com ethernet card has not yet been configured, but it requires a driver disk. Isn't the CD Audio Cable also used by games that stream audio from the CD?

Here are my Autoexec.bat, my Config.sys, and just in case, my ctpnp.cfg generated by CTCM. Currently uploading my BIOS config to an img sharing site so I can post that as well...

Autoexec.bat

1@ECHO OFF
2PROMPT $P$G
3SET DIRCMD=/W /P /O /4
4MODE CON RATE=32 DELAY=1
5REM MODE CON CP PREPARE=((437)EGA.CPI)
6REM MODE CON CP SELECT=437
7REM KEYB US,,KEYBOARD.SYS
8LH KILLER
9LH DOSKEY
10LH DOSLFN /Z:C:\DOS\CP437UNI.TBL
11LH MSCDEX /D:IDE-CD
12SET SOUND=C:\CREATIVE
13SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T4
14SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E
15SET CTCM=C:\CREATIVE\CTCM /T
16C:\CREATIVE\DIAGNOSE /S
17C:\CREATIVE\MIXERSET /P /Q 
18REM C:\CTCM\CTCU /S
19REM LH SHARE /L:30
20REM LH NLSFUNC
21REM LH SMARTDRV
22LH CTMOUSE
23REM For compatiblity purpose:
24LH CTMOUSE > NUL
25ECHO.
26REM For locking volumes to enable "direct disk access":
27CALL LOCKDRV.BAT
28BREAK ON
29LFNFOR ON
30PATH=C:\DOS;..;;C:\DOS\norton
31CLS

Config.sys

1DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
2DEVICE=C:\CREATIVE\CTCM\CTCM.EXE /T
3DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM
4DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
5REM DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\POWER.EXE
6DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:IDE-CD
7REM DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\DISPLAY.SYS CON=(,,1)
8COUNTRY=001,437,C:\DOS\COUNTRY.SYS
9SHELL=COMMAND.COM /P /E:640
10DOS=HIGH,UMB,AUTO
11FCBS=4,0
12FILES=40
13BUFFERS=20,0
14LASTDRIVE=26
15STACKS=9,256
16SET PATH=C:\DOS;..;

CTPNP.cfg

1[PNP]
2ReadPort=20b
3MaxCSN=255
4BypassPnPOS=0
5
6[SB16]
7Disable=0
8Csn=1
9CardId=CTL0026
10Serial=1006ada9
11LogDev=0
12Port0=220
13Port1=330
14Port2=388
15Irq0=5
16Dma0=1
17Dma1=5
18
19[GAMEPORT]
20Disable=0
21Csn=1
22CardId=CTL0026
23Serial=1006ada9
24LogDev=3
25Port0=200

Your AUTOEXEC.BAT is pointing to IRQ7 and your CTPNP.cfg is pointing to IRQ5

1SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T4

1[SB16]
2
3Disable=0
4
5Csn=1
6
7CardId=CTL0026
8
9Serial=1006ada9
10
11LogDev=0
12
13Port0=220
14
15Port1=330
16
17Port2=388
18
19[b]Irq0=5[/b]
20
21Dma0=1
22
23Dma1=5

Could cause issues with games that use the SET BLASTER line

IRQ7 is sometimes shared with the Parallel port, which if not in use can be disabled in the bios (unused com ports too).

Oh hey didn't notice that. I had manually changed the IRQ setting in autoexec to 5, because I sometimes use the parallel port with a controller adapter. Maybe the installer for SBMixer changed it back to 7 (or maybe I forgot to save haha). That might explain the SC2K installer not finding the card for SFX

Bios config stuff:
Integrated IDE and ports
IRQ and DMA settings

Okay, back home, fixed the autoexec.bat (which it seems was broken originally by the SB Diagnose program), SC2K could find the card for both music and SFX, but the audio during the intro movies is still the same as it was. Also, kind of sounds like the music was like "peaking" regardless of where the volume was set on my speakers. GTA was exactly the same as it was before, reconfigured sound card settings in game, no change, uninstalled/reinstalled no change. For kicks, tried replacing the CD after loading the game to verify audio does in fact stream from disc - instead of static, it started playing the music on the CD. Sound effects are still garbage, and the CD music in-game is all garbled and crackly. Sounds fine at the main menu though the sfx are garbage there too. Maybe this means my GTA disc is wrecked? Not sure if I have any other DOS games that stream audio from the CD while in game...

Okay, so the problem is fixed. Describing the solution is gonna be embarrassing. I went into CTMIX.CFG and set bass and treble back to their default settings, and turned CD Audio gain down from x2 to x1. That fixed pretty much everything - no more crunchy SFX in GTA, no more peaking in the intro videos to SC2K. Still just staticky white noise for music in GTA, checked it out in a regular old CD player and got the same staticky white noise on tracks 2+ so I guess my disc is done, surprised it didn't seem to affect the data track? Anyway I can play the game and just have to swap discs to provide my own music now, haha. I found that disc in the parking lot of the used game store I used to work at so I'm surprised it worked as well as it did, time to track down a nice boxed copy I guess.

Out of curiosity I wonder if you rip the audio tracks with cdparanoia or another program like that if it gives you errors.

toastdieb wrote on 2020-05-24, 03:29:

Okay, so the problem is fixed. Describing the solution is gonna be embarrassing. I went into CTMIX.CFG and set bass and treble back to their default settings, and turned CD Audio gain down from x2 to x1. That fixed pretty much everything - no more crunchy SFX in GTA, no more peaking in the intro videos to SC2K. Still just staticky white noise for music in GTA, checked it out in a regular old CD player and got the same staticky white noise on tracks 2+ so I guess my disc is done, surprised it didn't seem to affect the data track? Anyway I can play the game and just have to swap discs to provide my own music now, haha. I found that disc in the parking lot of the used game store I used to work at so I'm surprised it worked as well as it did, time to track down a nice boxed copy I guess.

Good stuff, I think my Rollcage disc also does this, just gives noise when trying to play the audio tracks, maybe some kind of disc rot or something hitting the audio tracks worse than the data.

Edit: yeah scratch that, Seems my version of Rollcage (some kind of re-release from DICE Multimedia) Has the Audio tracks as mode 1, so they've done something weird with the audio which isn't the same as the original / other retail releases which do have actual CD Audio tracks. Compared to other available images of the game from archive.org.