Extra sound channels are clientside only

[sabianroberts]

The Improvements for Mod Makers section of the Half-Life 25th anniversary update says that the maximum amount of sound channels has been increased to 32, however, this only works for clientside sounds. Serverside sounds using EMIT_SOUND for monsters and entities etc, are not able to utilise these extra channels and an attempt to use them results in an engine fatal error.

[SamVanheer]

This seems to be a common misunderstanding. They increased the global maximum amount of dynamic sounds that can be played concurrently, not the maximum number of per-entity channels.

This limit originated from Quake: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac8f1dae6a3981954bc9852d/WinQuake/sound.h#L131-L137

Changing the per-entity limit would also change the size of network messages which changes the network protocol and can cause reliable channel overflows on busy servers.