On 27-Mar-08, 14:19 (CDT), Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote: > No, this is not configurable. If the PCM slider does not work properly > on your sound card, then please report that to ALSA upstream. ALSA > (inofficially) gives the guarantee that "Master" always works for PCM > and "PCM" should be used as fallback. If this doesn't work on your > setup than this is a bug in ALSA. After browsing the ALSA bug system, and finding that there is apparently lots of weirdness with the snd-hda-intel driver (or with the hardware itself), and lots of updates, I built and installed the 1.0.16 version of ALSA (not sure what's in the 2.6.24 kernel). And JOY! The updated driver(s) create a MASTER mixer control, and it works in alsamixer. Curiously, the PCM control (which didn't do anything noticeable in the old driver) is gone, at least according to alsamixer. And now the weird bit: pavucontrol lists the output device as ALSA PCM on hw:0 (ALC662 Analog) via DMA and moving the slider does affect the volume, but it doesn't show in the alsamixer MASTER control, or on any other control. OTOH, the Input Device sliders *do* modulate the "CAPTURE" control. >From which I conclude: 1. Intel sound hardware is flaky 2. Alsa continues to be flaky, just like it has been for years. But I'm not sure it's their fault; it looks like every implentation of snd-hda-intel is broken in different ways. Regards, Steve -- Steve Greenland The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- seen on the net