Hi!

I'd like some help regarding a weird issue I am having with a "Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 SZ Video Editor" USB sound card, in Debian 12 (previously 11 too) and Linux Mint. I know it is an old piece of gear but it works well for what I need from it, except when it doesn't.

Basically, the issue is that I don't get sound via its Headset connector. ALSA, PulseAudio, and Pipewire exhibit the same behavior: everything seems to work, I get volume meters showing the playback is correct, but there is no sound coming out of the headsets.

The output connector works, because exactly the same setup works well in Windows, without requiring additional drivers.

In two different machines I noticed the first time I plugged it it worked just fine, but every time after that I get silence. I was unable to reproduce that behavior with a Live CD, but I think I noticed the first time the card loads a "dsp" driver but then it just uses "snd_usb_audio". Of course I tried to remove the configuration and restart everything but couldn't make it behave again, I don't know if that is because some configuration was left behind, or because that is not what happened and i'm following a false lead.

Other things I've noticed are that I get two ports I can select in the volume mixer apps (pulseaudio or pipewire, they're just the same on that regard): Headset 2 and Speakers. When I select "Speakers" the thing mutes itself because I have no speakers connected, so that makes sense. When "Headset 2" is selected the power led stays on, indicating the channel is not muted by the device.

Playing with alsamixer I noticed I can see more output channels, the interesting ones being Headset, Headset 2, and Headset 3. Interestingly, Headset 2 cannot be muted, but when I mute what ALSA shows me as Headset, the power led in the device starts blinking.

There is not a lot of info about this device online, at least with regards to Linux. At this point I believe I have two main paths to continue research:

1. Try different drivers for the thing, in case I'm able to find that "dsp" one I think it used when it actually worked
2. Try to force the output to be on "Headset" instead of "Headset 2"

In any case I don't know how to try any of the above. Any suggestions?



Regards

I had some more time to check things and I'm not closer to find an answer.

However, I was trying many things to try to find out what is going on. I installed pipewire following instructions from Debian wiki, then configured PulseAudio to be a "dump" pipe to ALSA as described in Arch wiki, but when I got to that point I was left without sound control in KDE desktop. So I reverted the changes, had to do a 'dpkg-reconfigure plasma-pa' to get everything working as before.

When I did that, I got sound working! but then I closed the desktop session and when I got back it was just silence again.

At least I could verify my possible leads are dead ends: the driver in use when sound worked was still snd_usb_audio, and the output in use was "Headset 2", so there is no need to think about changing or "forcing" anything there. Moreover, I was still getting the same error messages I get when it doesn't work, the more interesting of them being:

"Volume element Headset 2 has 9 channels. I can't handle that!"

and

"kernel: [255793.722788] usb 2-9.5: 2:16: usb_set_interface failed (-32)"

Anyhow, the problem has to be something being written to configuration files, and i'm determined to find at least a reliable workaround...

Found my workaround. Annoying, but reliable:

1. Disable auto-start of PulseAudio (systemctl --user disable pulseaudio) and kill it (pulseaudio -k)
2. Remove ~/.config/pulse
3. Start desktop session, confirm the volume control shows no devices (i.e. it doesn't work)
4. Start pulseaudio manually

If I do it that way, headsets work just fine. If I leave a pulseaudio process from a previous session, allow it to autostart, or don't clear the configuration, the problem reappears. All hints point to PulseAudio failing to configure itself for the device.

maybe look into pipewire and wireplumber, they seem to have better control.

I did try pipewire, in fact I upgraded my OS from Debian 11 to 12 just to try it, but it basically showed the same behavior. Granted, when I did the test I was still under the belief that the problem was with drivers, so I may as well try again.

Thanks!