[as3] question on sounds and sound channels

[divillysausages]

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:

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

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