Hi! I recently got a new laptop and switched from windows to manjaro and the volume is giving me a hard time.
I got a Thinkpad E14 amd gen2 and i noticed that the volume levels are much lower than they were in windows. Here are some of the problems:
1.The speaker output is much weaker to the point where I have to use 100% volume when watching a YouTube video.
2. No sound at all at lower volume levels. If i turn down the volume, everything below 20% - 30% gives no output at all.
3. When using full volume, I hear distortion and I can feel the speakers in the front of the laptop vibrating a little bit, like they are maxed out.
4. I set the max volume in PulseAudio to 150% and i do get a somewhat louder sound but it comes with a lot of distortion.
5.I opened alsa mixer and the master volume, bass speaker and PCM are set at a 100%.
6. I tried tinkering with HDAJackRetask and got no results.
I know that the laptop uses 2 HARMAN 2W stereo speakers.
Please help.
Initially I’d make sure that you understand the volume controls - in KDE, if I open ‘Audio’ from the menu (or from the system tray) I find HDMI and Headphone volume sliders/selectors on a Devices tab, then there’s an Application tab - Apps set their own volume.
Next up, in shortcuts (open from the menu) searching ‘media’ brings up ‘Media volume’ up and down - I set to ‘Alt + volume up/down’.
So system volume can be set separately to media volume… just make sure that’s not where your limit is.
Otherwise I see no difference in 0dB levels in Manjaro or Windows TBH.
The only reason for going past 100% is if there’s something you need to boost - for normal signals it’ll just lead to distortion and clipping.
When I was working out how this worked, I installed a plasma widget which is badly named ‘Win7 Mixer’ - it’s a very nice volume control widget that can be configured to show more sliders… I get separate sliders popping up for any apps on pulse.
Thanks, I’m using XFCE actually, so only PulseAudio is available from the menu. I played some music in the background while i was in the PulseAudio app, and the playback/media tab appeared so i just set that volume slider to 150% and returned the master volume to 100% and everything seems okay now.
Thank you very much for your help.
Yes, it’s Pulseaudio I was talking about. I’m not familiar with XFCE menu’s, but ‘Audio’ and ‘Audio Properties’ generally brings up Pulse settings - this has nothing to do with the actual devices (like ‘HDMI’ or ‘Headphones’ or ‘Speakers’). It is Pulse which gives options to separately set attenuation (volume reduction) for different applications separate to the Master volume.
So you should find the sliders for volume and for applications separately.
So if you play Audacious music at 50% whilst global volume is set to 100%, it will be quieter.