Check for cracked solder joints for the caps on the sound board.

Seen this several times before and its usually the 55536 cvsd chip.

Intermittent means connection issue generally. I'd reflow the caps and all header pins, and see what that does.

As I've already said seen this exactly before and its the cvsd chip. Check the schematic, sometimes its a 55564.

I have a similar issue except I lose all audio in my machine after about 5 minutes. Do you think that same chip is the issue for me? I can't find an answer yet and Im new to pinball repair.

I'd had success in replacing these before when the sounds cut out altogether, but there is still music, but haven't (myself) heard of an intermittent issue being as a result of one of these. Good to know.

Kris is pretty good with issues, so I don’t doubt him, and between the two things here, you should find your answer I think.

The CVSD is at U17, I think arcadechips.com carries them, not sure who else. I have seen this on several WPC sound boards and numerous system 11 boards. Speech is there at boot up and after 30-60 seconds disappears, turning the game on and off will immediately bring back the speech but it soon drops out again. Sometimes it drops out gradually over a 5-6 second span and the speech deteriorates as it does so, other times it just suddenly stops, but all usually within a minute of starting play.

This chip only produces speech or speechlike sounds (like Grand Lizard has no human speech call outs but the animal sounds are all produced with the speech chip), so unlikely that this is the culprit for Dahawks game. I would check the caps and ribbons like Atomicboy said and then maybe move on the the amps or pre-amps (op amps) or the RAM, ROM's and Processor chip. I listed them in what I believe to be the order of likelyhood.

Roland, sorry if I confused you but the list of other possible issues applies to Dahawks game, although that is normally how you would progress if swapping .u17 doesn't fix it.

Thanks for the tips. I'll try what I can and see where I get