Compatibility Reports for Creative Sound Blaster Z

Reported by Ralf


Rating
Operating system
MX Linux
Date

It almost was a plug and play experience with some serious flaws.

First of all, when switching to 5.1 via the Gui it switched channels between surround and center/sub. I thought I had plugged it the wrong way, but that wasn't the case. After a while I found out that using alsamixer I have another option to choose 5.1 instead of stereo. After switching that, it worked (for a while). I also wanted to solve a microphone problem and a problem with a possibly malfunctioning subwoofer. So I did some hardware plugging. This is what I found:
-My subwoofer indeed is wrecked, the output signal works fine.
-The front panel microphone jack doesn't work but the rear jack works perfectly (Which doesn't work at all with my Realtek 4080 onboard chip).
- The rear right speaker ceased to work during that testing.
After that partial success I booted Bazzite. Surprise: Channels where switched again, Gui 5.1. setting doesn't work properly, but setting it in alsamixer did the job. And here the rear right speaker has no problem at all! Perfect 5.1 Sound afaik.
- I didn't manage to get the spdif out working
- I didn't find any switches for sample rate and/or audio resolution.
- Rebooting MX Linux got me back to a malfunctioning rear right speaker, so it's a software problem.

But the alsamixer also provides a load of other possible settings, I can't see in the Gui of Dolphin (KDE6). Including Equalizer, Chrystalizer and some others. Maybe I can squeeze out more functionality eventually.

Reported by marcos


Rating
Operating system
Fedora
Date

Fedora 43: Initially, the sound card wasn't producing sound through the speaker system, but it was recognized by the system. Then, I installed alsamixer-firmware (sudo dnf install alsamixer-firmware), and the card produced audio through the speaker system. It worked great!

Fedora 43: inicialmente a placa não produzia som no auto falante da caixa de som, mas era reconhecida pelo sistema. Então, instalei o alsamixer-firmware (sudo dnf install alsamixer-firmware), e a placa produziu o áudio na caixa de som. ficou ótimo!

Reported by em00k


Rating
Operating system
Linux Mint
Date

Worked OOTB, although the advanced controls are not directly accessible via the GUI. Basic mixer controls levels are suppport in the GUI.

alsamixer offers a more complete set of controls including setting EQ preset, but no option to set a custom eq settings.

Bass cross over, Bass volume, Crystalyzer etc all preset.

alsamixergui will give you a very ancient rudimentary GUI.

Reported by Anonymous


Rating
Operating system
Ubuntu Linux
Date

After many hours was able to get sound to come out of speakers. Could not get an equalizer to work so sound output is much ower frequency than it should be. Dell XPS desktop system, Soundblaster Z card,.

Reported by jens


Rating
Operating system
Linux Mint
Date

Linux Mint 20 XFCE
Alsamixer works fine, but pavucontrol doesn't recognize headphones as plugged in and therefore doesn't let me choose the sound card as default output device. Although I can hear everything just fine, when I set the sound card as output device for an application manually.
It worked perfectly fine in the live system before installing the OS. Don't know why this bug appeared.

Reported by M


Rating
Operating system
Linux Mint
Date

Shows up as audio device, no sound.
Cinnamon 18.2 x64