Expert: Gregory Donner - 7/16/2011

Question
I recently bought a 2nd hand Amiga 600 HD from ebay with a 120mb hard disk fitted. It works perfectly except that I get short bursts of static periodically while sound is playing. The static is in time with the music and happens with both my speakers and headphones and with different cables.

Could the hard disk be interfering with the sound? Do I have a faulty sound chip and can it be repaired?

Thanks in advance!

Answer
Hi James,

It's possible that the Paula chip (which handles sound) is faulty, though all the custom chips on the A600's motherboard are wave-soldered directly, not socketed, so this cannot be replaced. I doubt the hard drive is interfering with the sound; you've ruled bad cabling out, so unfortunately, I don't know if this can be addressed. :( You could double-check though with the folks at the old comp.* groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.misc/topics:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.hardware/topics:

I hope this helps!

Greg