I notice when I use my USB dac amp with windows, the volume and the power it delivers is extremily loud.
When using from openSUSE TW, it is drastically lower. Is there a way to increase the power the device is getting?
The difference is night and day. On Win volue setting 2 is almost blasting and it can go mush higher. It is lounder then 100% volume on TW.
Unless someone has your specific hardware, I believe it will be very difficult for any to help you with the provided information. Can we look at some basic aspects to ensure that the basics are not a factor in your volume issue?
What is the output of the following when run in an xterm/konsole with regular user permissions?
amixer
I am rather out of date when it comes to sound issues, but I believe that despite the changes introduced with pulseaudio and pipewire, that it is still possible to tune volume levels on a per application and on a per device basis. The way to do that in the past (and I think still possible) is to use the application ‘pavucontrol’ (pulse audio volume control). Did you try using that app while attempting to play audio with your chosen multimedia application, and check its volume setting levels?
And my apologies if you already checked all of the above previously, and none of it relevant.
Hello Lee, thanks for following up on this.
So this also happens on my MacBook pro (2015 Intel) running openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux. So I believe it’s not a hardware issue. Also the same PC is dual booted into Windows 11 Pro, which seems fine with respect to getting very loud volume. So rules out hardware issues and might have something to do with Linux, or pulse audio, not sure.
$ amixer
Simple mixer control ‘Master’,0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 65536
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 29491 [45%] [on]
Front Right: Playback 29491 [45%] [on]
Simple mixer control ‘Capture’,0
Capabilities: cvolume cswitch cswitch-joined
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Capture 0 - 65536
Front Left: Capture 65536 [100%] [on]
Front Right: Capture 65536 [100%] [on]
Yes I did try Pulse Audio volume control and checked my device settings but this hasn’t helped.
I have no idea why on Windows the volume is blasting and I am scared to go over level 5, and this is without me providing an external power to the Fiio KA17 device.
Thanks,
Rajinder
From the amixer, your mixer volume playback was only set to 45%. Was that intentional?
The 45% is the same I see in the volume control widget from the toolbar, which seems to be the master volume. It is not a separate volume level limiter, that’s what I was kind of looking for.
I found and fixed the volume problem, it had to do with alsamixer, install and run this CLI UI.
Press F6 to select your device, in my case it was (Fiio KA17), hit enter to select.
Next increase the volume of the device to 100%
If you’re not getting any sound, first make sure to use pulseaudio volume control to configure the devices correctly. This can be really annoying and frustrating when not working.
sudo zypper pavucontrol
Here is what my configuration settings looks like:
You might want to take a not of current configuration settings, then turn off everything and work on each one at a time. It’s going to be trial and error process.
Optional Step: From the “Playback” tab from pulseaudio volume control, you can set the application volume to over 100% and then control the listening volume using the master volume as I did when listening to music or youtube from my browser. If you have a music app, you will need to do this again for it seperatly.
NOTE: You need to have something playing in the browser, it’s not good enough to just open the browser to see the volume control. Play a youtube vid and you will see the volume control and you can then set this past 100% like I did.
This way, I just control the listening volume later from the system volume control. This last step is optional, but since I am using a DAC + AMP I want my setting maxed out. Which on Linux still is under powered compared to on Win 11.
I found there 2 articles helpful. You may also need to install audio codec.
Additional openSUSE reference for Leap, so be careful not to add the packman from TW as it’s url is: “Index of /pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/”
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