Yeah, I fired up the alsa mixer with a couple of different guis just to be sure (aumix from a terminal window, alsamixer in X and gnome's version of same) and dinkered with every one of the sliders and toggles, but didn't have any luck.
There was an 'aux' that I thought might be in and a lot of the boxes were checked 'off' by default but none of them said anything even close to wavetable or synth.  Unfortunately I don't have a winblows install on that box to fire it up with the OEM drivers.
 
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Barack-O-phobia: The fear of politicians who think (more) government is the solution to every problem.
From: Cedric Roux <sed@free.fr>
To: Scott Webster Wood <treii28@yahoo.com>
Cc: linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2011 10:19 AM
Subject: Re: [LAU] Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 PCI sequencer problems

----- "Scott Webster Wood" <treii28@yahoo.com> wrote:
> # aplaymidi -p 128:0 sample.mid # this works
> # aplaymidi -p 16:0 sample.mid # this acts like it's doing something
> # but no sound comes out

volume up maybe? it's a different control than pcm as far as I remember.
try with alsamixer.
Maybe...