[as3] question on sounds and sound channels

hello,
in the Sound class documentation it says that you're limited to 32 sound channels. i'd like to create an object pool of sound channels so i can reserve some, and keep others in memory so i'm not constantly creating/deleting sound channel objects.
in the docs, it gives code like this:

Code:

---

var channel:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();
var snd:Sound = new Sound();
// load sound
channel = snd.play();

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which all looks fine. however in the Sound documentation, it says that Sound.play returns a new SoundChannel object. so in the sample above, am i left with 30 sound channels or 31?

thanks
Damian