@bert003 VSB, a much older piece of software, can work in two modes: in QEMM mode when QEMM is loaded, or in an alternative mode that works only when no EMM manager is loaded at all, since it will then switch the CPU into V8086 mode itself. But regardless of which mode it's used in, it does not work with protected mode (DOS extender) games. That's exactly the limitation that SBEMU and VSBHDA were designed to solve. For real mode games, they use port trapping through QPI (QEMM's API, which Jemm should now also support through a Jemm Loadable Module called QPIEMU.DLL). For protected mode games, they use port trapping using HDPMI. (At the moment, SBEMU needs a forked version of HDPMI for this, but that's another story.)
VSB, although an impressive piece of software, especially back in the '90s when it was initially written, is written in assembly, specifically Borland's TASM dialect, and the code is hard to maintain. The original author has long stopped working on it. Also, unlike SBEMU, VSB doesn't emulate FM synthesis. It only emulates the PCM playback functionality of the Sound Blaster card. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend it as an alternative to SBEMU or VSBHDA.
And indeed, like @tauro rightly pointed out, you need to be careful to use a newer (pre-release) Jemm version than the one that currently ships with FreeDOS 1.3. Even v5.83, which is still listed as the "latest" release of Jemm on GitHub, isn't new enough. Support for port-trapping ISA DMA ports, which is required for both SBEMU and VSBHDA to work, wasn't included until version v5.84pre1, and a bug in this new functionality was fixed in version v5.84pre2, which is the latest available build at the time of this writing. To my knowledge, that's currently the best version to use with SBEMU or VSBHDA.
Also, in addition to using at least v5.84pre2 of Jemm, you also need to load the QPI Emulation module (QPIEMU.DLL) using JLOAD. See the documentation for detailed instructions on that.
I guess you could also use QEMM, but it's closed source and no longer maintained. Jemm, on the other hand, is free and open source, and still being maintained and regularly improved by Baron-von-Riedesel (f.k.a. japheth).