System audio being output through headset microphone even if microphone is physically muted

Hello everyone.

I am having an issue with my system’s audio being transmitted through the microphone channel on my headset. This persists even if my mic is physically muted (flip-to-mute). This issue has been confirmed to happen across multiple headsets, and it can be reproduced no matter what recording software is used. I’ve tried googling what to do but apparently nobody has had this issue before (or worded it in the same way I have). I have absolutely no idea where to start on fixing this. Please help.

I installed Manjaro days ago and have the same problem. Did you find any solution?
I have a Creative Labs EMU20k2 [Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Series] as soundcard and no clue to solve that problem. Every sound is still played through the “microphone-channel”.

I tested some things and switched also to the onboard soundcard. With that everything is fine.
Only the X-Fi has that problem. Anyone any advice?

Creative had a patented option in their old soundcards called ‘What U Hear’ that would allow any audio capture or playback to be mixed and recorded. and most of it was turned on by default

Win7 and later has a similar option of an audio capture recording ‘Stereo Mix’, usually turned off by default because it does not work with some audio devices

Some Realtek audio codecs have a similar feature for ‘loopack mixing’ to monitor audio capture inputs, but they are usually turned off by default

for an X-Fi card, ALSA sound settings has 3 audio capture devices - Mic, Line and IEC958 (S/PDIF)
Each capture device has a capture control for recording,
and an audio playback control for monitoring audio

To turn off the audio monitoring you can use ALSA mixer controls in terminal

alsamixer --view=Playback

Press F6 and select the X-Fi card

Arrow keys to find the control for MIC

and M to mute the control - so it is shown as [MM] in mixer

When settings are to your liking, exit alsamixer and save ALSA settings

sudo alsactl store