Hardware Support Question about Creative AE-5 or AE-7 Soundcard

Support Sound
1

Hello guys,
i hope this is not to much offtopic but i want to buy a new Soundcard since my creative X-Fi Soundcard
has a little hardware fault and the Centerspeaker from my 5.1 speakers is no longer working in Windows (except Youtube Videos or non-Stereo Video Sources) and also not working in Manjaro (even Youtube is dead silence, but Headphones working fine in Manjaro and Linux.

I want to buy a new creative soundcard this week and i want to know if its safe to buy the new Creative AE-5 or AE-7 and which one is recommend? Related to driver support from Manjaro for Headphone and 5.1 Speaker’s for non gaming in Linux (i only play on Windows).

In this Artikel Creative AE-7 Linux Support it shows that the AE-7 get a new driver support since October 2020, since this card is pretty new, does it mean there will be more issues with AE-7 related to longer existing AE-5 drivers?

Im also interesting to know, if i need to adjust/tweak with additional tools.
I read on google something about Pulse Audio that is required on Ubuntu to run the AE-5, but Pulse Audio is integrated with manjaro anyways right? So everything should work right out of the Box?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Kobold

2

Support for AE-7 was added to first Release Candidate version of kernel v5.10 in October
LKML: Takashi Iwai: [GIT PULL] sound updates for 5.10

Manjaro currently has kernel v5.10 rc4 and should support the ca0132 driver and work in ALSA ok
But PulseAudio does not recognise some of the features of current Creative audio devices, so a new card may not work perfectly out of the box

1 Like
3

I’m really new with Linux/Manjaro, im not really into this… even as a PC nerd.

I never heared anything about Alsa yet, is this programm or driver though to install and to config?

I just searched in Pamac, there is alot stuff installed from Alsa already in Manjaro… im intresting to know if ALSA also required for Creative AE-5 and X-Fi Soundcards or only for the AE-7.

Do you know, which features are missing when running without ALSA?