I am planning on sending out my soundboard if this is the case. Recently I had my TZ crash on me and sent my cpu and power driver boards out to be fixed by John Wart Jr (you rock!). Anyways, when I got the game back the issue didn't go away. When I reseatted the ribbon cables the game booted up and worked for about a week. This past thursday the game crashed shortly after bootup (lines on dmd noise through speakers, sometimes flippers would be flipped up) I started to eliminate the boards until the game started working again.

It turned out if I disconnect the connectors to the sound board the game would work with no problem. I tried reseating all the connectors on the soundboard and the game would boot and crash after about 5 seconds past the boot screen when the game is in attract mode. I replaced all the ribbon cables thinking it was a connection issue but it doesnt seem to be the case.

Can a soundboard cause an issue and send some signal back to the cpu board and crash it?

The game runs fine without the soundcard connected.