On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Norbert Zeh <nzeh@cs.dal.ca> wrote:
Things I observed (on Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Arch...so it's not distro-specific) were way too low input (mic) and output volumes even when setting the volume controls to 100%. I really wanted to use PA because it offers something ALSA does not: simultaneous audio streams from different applications (i.e., when firing up Windows in a VirtualBox, it does not hog my audio). So I googled for hours, read through forum posts, etc. and all I could find were hacks that either didn't work at all or resulted in the right volume but at completely unacceptable distortion levels.
So, I'm almost certain that I am doing something wrong with configuring my audio setup using PA,
This sounds like a good, old-fashioned bug, I don't think you did anything wrong in your setup. Most likely your sound driver (ALSA) is exporting the wrong dB information to PulseAudio which means that PA's volume calculations will be nonsense. Please file a bug against ALSA. Cheers, Tom