[alsa-devel] wrong decibel data?

[Raymond Yau]

2010/6/14 James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com>

> On 14 June 2010 15:17, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> >
> > I've made this change on my system and while previously my UI had no
> > "Base Volume" displayed (because all my "h/w" (I include softvol in
> > that) controls had their dB value >0.
> >
> > Now that this change is live, I have a base volume present in my GUI (at
> > around the 64% mark with the cubic scale we've already discussed). When
> > I set my volume ot the base volume, the h/w controls are all set to 0dB
> > which is exactly as expected.
> >
> > I fail to see the point here? The base volume is clearly exposed to the
> > as the recommended point on the scale at which no clipping occurs.
> >
> > I really don't get where your complaint is.
> >
>

alsamixer -D pulse does not show that sweet spot to the user



>
> Well, if you can define "Volume" in a way that lets you understand
> this then fine.
> For me, all these controls are not adjusting "Volume", they are
> adjusting "Gain", so why are they even called "Base Volume".
>

If you play music using aplay or mplayer with modified front device , you
should notice that the playback signal after passing the softvol plugin is
already clipped when you set the softvol to 12dB (software gain is the cause
of this clipping )