18.04.2015 01:26, Tanu Kaskinen wrote: > This card can be used in analog or digital mode, and in the digital > mode there's no hardware volume or mute support. With the default > configuration PulseAudio only sees a single "speaker" port, and > assumes that controlling the Speaker element has some effect, which > is not true in the digital mode. To work around this, let's add a > special path configuration for this card to disable hardware volume. > > It would be better to disable hardware volume only in the digital > mode, but I believe there's no way to automatically figure out which > mode is in use, and requiring the user to tell which mode is in use > at any given time would not be user-friendly. I have one concern with this plan. You are going to always use software volume on a high-end card, and default to 30%, which is around -30 dB. So you have just robbed 5 bits out of the DAC resolution. Due to the fact that internal processing in PulseAudio is most likely based on 16-bit samples in this use case, the DAC effectively becomes only 11-bit, and without proper dithering. I am not sure whether owners of the said card will appreciate that. So effectively, you are trading one bug for another. Sorry, I don't have any easy and constructive suggestions. Does the card support 32-bit input samples? [that was the solution to the same kind of problem in the plug+softvol+dmix era that was implemented on my request in 2008] -- Alexander E. Patrakov
