The mini jacks on Creative cards are notorious for broken solder joints, broken pc board traces, and should be examined carefully visually for such as well as a bit of mechanical wiggling and otherwise disturbing the plugs in the jacks while sound is playing through them. This goes double for the case where heavy plugs, cords, or adaptors are placing an undo moment angle on the little jacks.

Resolder usually corrects, in the case of broken PCB trace, adding a bit of fine copper wire to bridge the broken trace after scraping it clean and shiny, then soldering, provides a bit of mechanical robustness to the connection.

Also recall one situation where the plastic in one of the jacks had cracked for the Line Input, of course that necessitated ordering up the proper replacement jack. (If it had been my own card, would have just "pigtailed" whatever jack I had through the hole, soldering wires to the board and passing the tiny cable out the hole where the jack should be to an inline jack of whatever I had in the "junk box" in the way of a stereo mini jack.)

The electronics of the cards themselves are hard to kill, actually, although I've seen it. Both cases were result of direct powerline lightning hits, though, and the soundcards were the least of those customer's problems at that point.


--Mac

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