thinking of the problem about shared volume controls again, I stumbled on a case where your suggested solution doesn't work well. Namely, when a headphone volume is shared for two headphones (one on the laptop and one on the dock), how should it be named? One is "Headphone" and another is "Dock Headphone". That's a bit tricky.
So, in the end, we need the mapping representation somehow more explicitly than the control name.
Thoughts?
In practice, it seems like we more often than not share DAC for all
headphones. Also it is very common today that a jack called "Front Headphone" has a volume control called only "Headphone".
That's the status quo. As a result we have only one headphone path in
PulseAudio for all types of headphones.
And it kind of works as long as we *always* share DAC between the
different headphones.
it is unlikely that dual headphone jacks share DAC on those Dell XPS notebook with 8 channels hda codec
Surround 40 should not be supported when headphone and dock headphone always share DAC
Are there any difference when dock station has dock line out instead of dock headphone?
Another ad hoc case is asus g75 with vt1802 which have speaker and subwoober, headohone and speaker share DAC so that the subwoofer can have volume control
For Dell alienware notebook with alc668, headset and headphone jack, mic jack internal 2.1 speaker
User expect the headset jack default to be used as headset since the notebook has another headphone jack