I'm running OpenSuse 11.4 with KDE 3. I started with KDE 4, but
found it to be a disaster (virtual desktop pager doesn't work,
akonadi/nepomuk tie up cpu, etc), but I seem to be using KDE4's
kmix. It reports its version as 3.8 (for KDE 4.6.0), but yast
says it's 4.6.0-3.3-i586. Anyhow, it works much better for my
sound chip than the other mixers I've tried. It's in /usr/bin/kmix
I suggest checking yast to see if a later version of kmix than
the one you have is available.