USB Sound much too loud

pbmonster · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2009 Posts: 21

Hi Guys,

I bought a "Creative Sound Blaster Play!" USB sound card to replace my laptops crappy onboard chip. The USB card works fine (I guess with snd_usb_audio and snd_usb_lib, "lsmod | grep snd" lists 13 additional modules), except for the fact that it is VERY loud.
I plug my headphones directly into the headphone jack, and using alsamixer the volume distribution is as follows:
0-3% (-28.3dB to - 27.63dB): the sound is muted, totally.
4-5% (-27.63db to -26.88dB) : the sound is OK for when I'm actively listening to music, I often would like to have it quieter.
5-100% : I fear for the health of my eardrums and for my headphones.

On a sidenote: 4%-5% are 4 discrete values (different values of dB). They are exactly the same volume. Yes, I have exactly ONE level at which I can use the card.

Is there anything I can do about that? Can I send the entire output through a software filter without losing to much quality? Am I missing drivers/modules for greater control of the output?

All responses are appreciated.

PS: I use only the basic ALSA setup, done 2 years ago as instructed in the gentoo handbook.
no OSS, no pulseaudio, and I don't have the desire "upgrading" to pulseaudio.
_________________
“Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.”

EatMeerkats · Apprentice Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 234

Do you have a PCM channel in alsamixer? If you do, maybe you can decrease the volume there? Otherwise, I think pulseaudio is your best bet, unfortunately. :twisted:

pbmonster · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2009 Posts: 21

Hi, thanks for responding.
In fact I don't have a PCM mixer, and up until now I didn't miss one either, because the onboard chip always started making weird noise when PCM went above 50%.

Now that I have googled PCM and know what it is, I realised it's probably exactly what I need. Can you shove me in the direction of "HOWTO add a PCM mixer to a card that doesn't have one already"? Thanks again ;-)

_________________
“Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.”

EatMeerkats · Apprentice Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 234

You can't really just add a PCM channel to an existing mixer — it's dependent on the driver, and your USB sound card's driver apparently doesn't have one. Your best option at this point is probably to bite the bullet and give PulseAudio a try. It's really not difficult to get working. Just 'emerge pulseaudio', add 'pulseaudio' to your USE flags in /etc/make.conf, re-emerge at least alsa-plugins, then put the following in /etc/asound.conf: