[pulseaudio-discuss] Realtek ALC892 being overdriven to 153 % volume

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and David Henningsson at 20/06/11 10:13 did gyre and gimble:
> On 2011-06-20 10:31, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> Interesting. Smells like someone is patching something somewhere then.
>> Like I say I don't have this problem here - volume keys will have their
>> upper limit @100%
>>
>> I'd still be generally in favour of limiting the keys to 100% but
>> ultimately it's up to the Dekstop environments to decide what they think
>> is best.
>>
>> So I'd get in touch with the relevant gnome people and ask the question:
>> Should the keys limit the volume to 0dB, but with the UI allowing up to
>> +11dB?
> 
> We'll just add a compressor plugin, so everything sounds louder ;-)

Hehe!

> Just kidding. Anyway, if I were a UI designer and got that proposal, I
> would probably scratch my head and wonder why the PulseAudio folks
> couldn't decide on one maximum volume only...

Well it's about use case. In a typical setup, the user shouldn't *have*
to go above PA_VOLUME_NORM. They may need to in some special cases and
we don't want to make those special cases too tricky to enable, but we
don't want people accidentally enabling them either as it leads to
questions exactly like the one asked in this thread.

So we need to make some kind of compromise.

In my mind I see three possible solutions:
 1. Just stick to 0dB for the media keys handling, but handle things
gracefully if the volume is >0dB (e.g. volume up == noop, volume down =
step down normal amount (i.e. don't reset to 0dB-step immediately on
first press).

 2. Just go up to +11dB and don't do anything different. Accept that
upstream will get several death threats (or rather "why does PA do this?
It's dump, you guys are idiots" emails).

 3. Allow going up to 0dB via key repeats, but require a stall and
second-press of the buttons to get >0dB, change the OSD to red or some
other warning colour to let the user know they are overdriving and
provide other UI hints in e.g. dock volume controls that this is the
case and give the user enough feedback to be able to reset it if needs be.


1. is clearly the simplest, 2, clearly sucks, 3 might be the most
holistic solution. Everyone will likely have a different opinion on what
is best. Perhaps this is something you can add in to the usability study
with jack detection and expectations thereof?

Col



-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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