This is the Zoom U-22. It’s a 96Khz/24bit USB audio card for Windows and Mac.
There’s 2 things that strike out as interesting here:
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No testing on Linux has been done for this DAC.
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They suggest against using this DAC with AMD chipsets.
To get a few things out of the way:
Yes, it works in Linux at 96khz/24bit. (I recommend using the tsched=0
fix to adjust your audio buffer size)
Yes, it works on the USB ports directly going to the processor on Ryzen. (Not the ASmedia ports, the 3.0 ports going directly to the CPU)
There is one massive caveat though:
Anytime the device is re-initialized on pulseaudio’s end, you get a cyloning effect. This is most apparent when you change sound input/output configs in KDE settings, or if you launch OBS without killing Pulseaudio.
If you encounter “cyloning”, kill pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k
in Terminal.
To get OBS working, you must kill pulseaudio first, then launch OBS. If you already launched an audio program and OBS re-initializes the DAC using a scan, you get cyloning.
Be prepared to use that command a lot, and finding what order to launch programs that won’t cause the DAC to cylon upon recording or playback…
TL;DR: Yes it works on Linux, but be prepared to use pulseaudio -k
a lot at 96khz.
Edit: A firmware update to version 1.1 did not fix cyloning.
However, using 48000hz sample rate does not have the cyloning issue when launching OBS or changing stuff in KDE settings. Using 96000hz sample rate causes the cyloning. What this means is the maximum sample rate has issues with cyloning and pulseaudio, but it can be fixed by killing pulseaudio.