On Sun, 2014-11-16 at 21:23 +0500, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > 16.11.2014 13:10, Tanu Kaskinen wrote: > > If a sound card has no hardware volume that we could query when > > creating a sink, 30% is a better default volume than 100%. 100% is > > likely to be far too loud. > > Please make sure this is not applied on digital outputs (i.e. SPDIF and > HDMI/DisplayPort). There, 100% is the correct default, especially > because volume is expected to be the same by default in the cases of > passthrough and normal playback. > > P.S. I have not read enough context, sorry if this code path is already > only ever executed for analog outputs. The code path is executed for all outputs, so your feedback is very valid, thanks! You didn't explain very thoroughly why 100% would be the best default for digital outputs. You mentioned that the volume should by default be the same for passthrough and non-passthrough. That alone doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to default to full volume, however, because if the full volume is way too loud, then the full volume should be avoided in any case. Passthrough is a special case that shouldn't drive the design to the extent that the common cases become broken. That said, I believe the digital outputs are typically associated with another important property: the existence of an extra volume control between the sound card output and the speakers. If that's the case, then I think it's a good idea to default to 100%, because the extra volume control is likely going to limit the output to a sane level. I have extremely little personal experience of systems that use digital outputs, but it seems to me that such systems are very likely to have a separate volume control - I haven't heard of direct-to-speakers hardware with digital input that wouldn't have volume control. This "separate volume control" logic applies to analog outputs too in theory, but in practice we never know with analog outputs whether there's a separate volume control or not. -- Tanu
