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I've bought some new speakers, and they play much louder than my old ones. It's so much that I most of the time keep them at 1% to 3% in alsamixer, which is -103dB to -84dB.

This obviously leaves little room for details in configuration. 3 options in total. What I would like is to be able to set them at 1.6% or 2.3%. Or even better: to tweak the function mapping percentages to dB, so I could make the load "area" take up less "room" in the percentage scale.

Do you by any chance know if alsa supports this level of configuration?

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You can use amixer to better control the volume. But it really depends on the channel/card. For example, my card only has 255 levels, so even if I issue amixer set PCM '0.1dB-', the volume is reduced by a full 0.2 dB.

Btw, it's a command line program, not graphical control. See man amixer or amixer -h.

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Thank you. I couldn't get absolute or relative dB setting to work, but I can use amixer sset Master 0.1%+ and amixer sset Master 0.1%- to finely adjust volume. – Thomas Ahle Jan 26 '12 at 20:08
It also seems like alsa internally uses a playback limit in the range 0 - 65536. 2% thus corresponds to 0.02*65536, and so it is not possible to "remap" percentages to different dB levels. – Thomas Ahle Jan 26 '12 at 20:12

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