http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=905021
--- Comment #11 from Takashi Iwai
Why I am using percentages? Hmm, I can use pixels.
Say, you have a slider 100 pixels long. The position of the knob corresponds to volume level.
Today:
0-80 pixels, the sound is to quiet, and unusable at all.
80-100 pixels, sound is OK.
Previously:
0-20 pixels, quiet sound.
20-50 -- OK.
50-80 -- quite loud.
80-90 -- loud.
90-100 -- to loud for regular listening.
Comparing those two UI say which range (1 or 2) is more useful for daily usage.
If you buy stereo, and you get the knob, same story, you cannot get noise or even loud music, because when you reach max of the knob position the sound is merely OK. Does it look like a stereo defect or not?
Yes, it's a defect. As I mentioned, your *previous* setup was just wrong. It was a bug, some multiplication was done without noticing. Now it's correctly adjusted and you see the real effect.
dBs are irrelevant here, because I simply never used dB to set my volume. It was always in sense of the range of the knob -- 25% or range, 50% of range, 100% of range. And the output was quiet, loud or very loud, etc. Do you know a user (except pro musician) who enters "oh, give me 40 dB now"?
That's why I repeatedly say "don't use percentage". It's just some number between 0 and 100, so you can't trust it. Again: what do you mean as 50%? How loud it must be? A program maps the signal strength from the silence (the minus infinite dB) to max (0dB) into a range between 0 and 10%. As you can easily imagine, it's non-linear. And the sense of your ears is even more non-linear. It makes things unintuitive: 50% of 50% isn't 25% in the audio level. If you have another machine with another sound hardware, compare the sound level in the same dB. If they don't match, then it's a bug in the hardware; namely, the HD-audio driver just reads the dB information from the codec chip. In such a case, we may put some corrects in the driver. But, without actually comparing quantitatively, there is no way to "fix" anything. We have to trust more or less what hardware gives, after all. So, please: give more precise and quantitative measurement for the proper correction. Not your feeling. Give exact objective numbers. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.