Soundblaster X7 5.1 sound distortion

Hi Everyone!

I have Soundblaster X7 soundcard that I would like to use to listen to 5.1 music (I use VLC as the player). I listen to 5.1 DTS, WAV, etc.

Everything works fine, except when certain high-frequency sounds are made for the center or surround back channels there is a cracking sound.

Now, it is not my speakers or my amp – when I connect the soundcard to the Windows machine and play the same 5.1 files everything works flawlessly without distortion.

In addition, to test I connected earphones to the center and surround outputs of the card when the card is plugged into a Linux machine and hear the same cracking sound (again, it is not the amp).

One more interesting observation: as a mad experiment, I have directly attached the soundcard USB directly to a VirtualBox machine running Windows 10 (with VirtualBox running on my Linux machine in question). It detected it, I installed it, and it did not work. However, when I detach it from the Virtual Machine, and play the same files on Linux the sound card sometimes starts working normally.

Any help is much appreciated!