Desperate for help with Soundblaster zx

I run KDE Neon with a Soundblaster zx. No matter what distro I try, my soundblaster does not work unless I only have selected dual analog output. I’ve messed with every setting in alsa, I’ve downloaded drivers from github, I’ve updated my kernel, I’ve installed alsa firmware and tools through apt, I’ve tried all I can think of! It’s worked flawlessly in my KDE Neon install for years but a recent update has disabled the output completely. Other distros go back to only seeing dual analog output. What should I do? I really like my sound card and don’t want to sell it.

Find out what update broke it and roll it back. Was this a kernel update? Alsa? Pipewire? Pulse Audio?

Please give more information. In general SB stuff is not GNU/Linux friendly.

I tried locking the pulse and alsa packages, that didn’t fix it. I don’t use pipewire. The linux headers and whatnot updated but I’m not sure that caused the bug. I know SB isn’t linux friendly but I already had it when I switched and has never been a problem until now. The strange part is it not working on ANY distro which makes me think it is something recent

If your driver/firmware package needs to compile some code using the kernel headers, it is possible that there may be an ABI change in the kernel and the driver/firmware may not be compatible. Try downgrading the kernel and kernel header package and try again. It has been so long since I have used SB equipment that I don’t know if I can be of much help.

Just to confirm, you have
1.) installed alsa-firmware
2.) installed alsa-utils
3.) unmuted your desired audio channels
(Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ArchWiki)
3.) Make sure that the sound modules are loaded for your card, lsmod | grep '^snd' | column -t
4.) Making sure that you turn off auto mute (on startup) amixer -c 0 sset "Auto-Mute Mode" Disabled where the number after c is the sound card. You can also use amixer if you have the alsa-utils installed.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ArchWiki
5.) if you have to play through two channels in order to get sound (sounds like your issue) then you may need to do something like amixer sset "Auto-Mute" unmute which will basically unmute all channels on startup.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ArchWiki

But again, pretty sure that there was something that changed in your update and you can either revert your changes until you find what broke or you can live with the new normal and setup a script to run on start up to do the things that you found restore capability. Good luck.

IIRC the driver is in kernel.
Try using older linux live CDs like the e.g Ubuntu 18.04 and then 20.04 to see if it works with them and with which one.
Then check the kernel, alsa-firmware and alsa-utils versions if it works.

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