[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio is designed to damage your hearing

[Andrew Eikum]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 02:10:44PM +0000, Patrick May wrote:
> I've lost count of the number of times Pulseaudio has been responsible for
> noise being blasted through my headphones at 100% maximum volume or my
> speakers suddenly blasting audio at 100% maximum loudness

You may be running into the flat-volumes mis-feature. You can find
lots of discussion of this online, for example[1]. Mercifully, it was
disabled by default in PulseAudio 14.0[2], which was released late
last year.

If you're running PulseAudio >= 14, then it's possible you have an
older configuration file lingering with flat-volumes still enabled.
Most likely that would live in </etc/pulse/daemon.conf> or in
<~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf>. If you're on older PulseAudio, you can
disable flat-volumes in those same files.

If you're certain that flat-volumes is disabled, then I'm not sure
what would cause your issue. Possibly some stream volume restoration
bug, or misbehaving mixer software? PulseAudio has fairly verbose
logging, which may give you a clue as to what is causing your volume
to be unexpectedly maxxed out. See the LOGGING section of
pulse-daemon.conf(5).

[1] https://200ok.ch/posts/2019-05-20_disable_flatvolume_for_pulseaudio.html

[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/14.0/#flatvolumesarenowdisabledbydefault

Andrew