This is a tale of misplaced blame

The sound card output went through a home theatre system. Russian
black basso profundos singing through the appalling woofer vibrated
everything near including the A1 box. The front right channel went.

I thought the woofer which contained the 5+1 circuitry had vibrated
one of its terminal connections off. I may as well resurrect my
8 cu.Ft bass reflex speakers built 35 years ago anyway. Found and
repaired a suitable 20w/channel amp, etc. etc. and did not bother
with sound from the computer anyway.

Eventually noticed though that one channel was absent from the
sound card itself. I blamed the cable but nothing was wrong with
that. Whay's it matter anyway?

These random lockups are a great nusiance though. Absolutely
guaranteed with X11 at some stage etc etc. Is some software
unstable? X11, YAM, something to do with roadshow, could it be
the poor memory handling of 68k software falling foul of the
new memory system. I just took the lockups as par for the
course and carried on anyway. Blame the software, blame the
hardware, piece of crap but how come some people seem to go 24/7
with no problems of this sort.

Club night comes: go to move the computer out to the lounge. Hmm
it's a bit dusty. Clean it out. May as well reseat the sound card.
Clean it up first. Hard to get it in and out with a sil680 one side
and a useless TV card the other, but at least it is clean.

Set up in lounge. Start up. OK open YAM. Crash. Repeat a few times.
Workbench is not initialised. Horrors, have I disturbed the ram?
Eventually get going again. Test says workbench is OK. James calls.
Wants me to download a video via wookiechat. Goes well into ram.
Copy from ram to hd - no sweat. James wants to know if I like it.
Start it, sound OK then a roar ending in a prolonged squeal and
crash like they do on TV.

Pull out TV card. Replace soundcard in slot out of contact with
the sil680 cable connectors. Can't boot. Make sure sil680 is well
bedded down and connectors connecting. All goes well with bootup.
YAM? no trouble, play videos - no sweat. Try to make system crash,
can't - put stereo system back to stereo , got both channels now.
It dawns on me. My so called random lockups may not have been
random. They just tended to occur when some software wanted to
squawk or play a jingle. No system problems since. Simple as that
huh! Like complaining for years about a squeaky hinge and never
oiling it.

Hmmm...I'm wondering how many people have troubles too because of
the tension of those short as possible cables from the controller
card to the drives? Any vibration may impair connector contacts.

--
Noel