Abstract: I installed an 18 year old sound card in a modern-day Linux PC and the damn thing just worked.
Shit talking my dad
My father is an IT professional, AS400 class, “I remember when it was called the System 38” rank. When it comes to PC hardware, he can usually identify a PC when shown one. Doesn’t really give a shit. He buys Dells because they gave him a line of credit. He shops by buying the second most expensive XPS they offer. He’s been doing that since Core i7s had three-digit model numbers. I know because I’ve got one of his old machines in the other room. And I’d like to beat the teeth out of the four-flushing worm-headed sack of monkey shit that sold it to him.
This machine was surprisingly full of option cards for a PCIe-era box. Graphics card? Fine. USB 3.0? Was new in those days, that’s a reasonable cost option. Gigabit ethernet NIC? You mean like the one built into it’s motherboard? Soundblaster X-Fi? Huh. See, the bottom section of the motherboard IO shield has this curious plastic blanking plate. Pick that off with your fingernails and it pops free, revealing six 3.5mm jacks. The motherboard has functioning built-in surround sound. And yet they sold my father a goddamn Soundblaster. They did this enough to manufacture blanking plates specifically for that job. Corporations are bullshit.
Installing an 18 year old Soundblaster in a modern Fedora box
So, I’ve got a reasonable self-built gaming PC, I run Fedora KDE on it. It’s got a Realtek 7.1 something something chip built in, but only 3 plugs in the rear. I happen to own an old Dell 5.1 surround sound speaker system. You can attach these things together, in Linux you have to use HdaJackRetask to reassign the rear jacks to put out the rear, front and subwoofer channels properly, and once you’ve got that done you’ll be treated to these eardrum rupturing pops as the sound chip turns itself on and off to save power. Changing a couple files somewhere in /etc can fix that…until you reboot the machine, to make that change permanent you have to change some other file somewhere else…
Then I had a thought. I own an old but functional PCIe Soundblaster designed specifically to drive surround sound PC speakers and an open card slot in my machine. Why not?
I go to extract the card from the old Dell, noticing a cable is plugged into the front edge of the card. Memories of old sound cards of yore having passthrough cables from the optical drives went through my head before I realized it was the HD audio cable from the front IO panel. Oh yeah. So when I installed it in my new PC, I made sure to move the HD audio cable from the motherboard to the sound card.
Booted into Fedora, open the audio settings, select 5.1 surround, and it works. The driver is built right into the kernel, nothing to install or configure. Then I thought to test if the front IO worked. I plugged in a headset, and I got audio out of the headset and the speakers.
Nothing I could do would get it to detect the plug and mute the rear IO. I dug through alsamixer and such, no dice.
I tried a bluetooth headest, that worked fine. Because a Bluetooth device is kind of a whole other sound card, it just…stops sending audio data to the sound card.
Head tilt.
Shut down, switch the HD audio cable back to the motherboard, boot.
With no headset attached, audio is sent to the Soundblaster and out the 5.1 speakers. Plug a headset in the front IO, it auto-detects and switches to the onboard Realtek chip. The speakers go quiet and I get stereo out of the headset. Turn on my bluetooth headset and sound goes there.
It…works. I got audio to just fucking work. In Linux.
My dad gave me a nice audio set including a pair of speakers, a Rotel power amp, and a Rotel amp that I use as a pre-amp.
This thing sounds wonderful. The problem was, I only got a Thinkpad to drive it. Now, Thinkpads may have shitty speakers, but they are by no means bad audio device. That HD audio still does the job well enough for most case.
But this is not most case. For my case, I wanted something more, without shedding the convenience of internet. Sadly, a desktop PC is not an option, due to some constraints.
So I got myself a USB soundblaster. This thing sounds phenomenal! And I only had to plug it in. My only complaint is that the volume knob does not work.
I’d guess, without looking, that instead of controlling hardware in the interface, it probably intends to talk to the PC. It may do this by presenting itself as an attached USB keyboard and simulating media key presses.
If this is Linux, you’re likely seeing XF86AudioLowerVolume and XF86AudioRaiseVolume keysyms sent. You can run
xev(this works on Wayland as well, but be sure to have your mouse cursor over thexevwindow) and turn the knob to check.This would be consistent with it doing that:
https://old.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/ox2xhs/sound_blaster_x4_volume_issue/
If this is Linux, you can probably set up software to have those keysyms do whatever you want when pressed, but under Wayland, it’ll depend on the compositor you’re using. I use sway, which doesn’t appear to have them do anything out of box, but you could set it up to fiddle the volume on your currently active sound output or whatever.
Sounds about right. It’s supposed to be some kind of USB button input. But it seems only the audio device part is working.
I tried to detect button input, but it doesn’t seem to go thru in any way. I’m currently using Linux Mint on that (LMDE 7 to be exact). Haven’t tried using other setup.
It doesn’t bother me that much tho. The laptop itself has some standalone volume buttons, so that helps.