Bug 101293

Summary:	Low sound on Thinkpad laptop
Product:	PulseAudio	Reporter:	jonatan
Component:	clients	Assignee:	pulseaudio-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED MOVED	QA Contact:	pulseaudio-bugs
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	lennart
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	Commands output

Description jonatan 2017-06-04 01:06:53 UTC

My computer have really low sound and I need to increase the volume by 300 percent to hear something when I listen to for example youtube. 

For this I use this command in the terminal: pactl set-sink-volume alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo 300%

It would be useful to use the GUI for this in Gnome. I would also be useful for normal users that are not familiar with the terminal and don't know that it can be changed with a command. I think many laptops have a problem with too low sound.

Comment 1 Tanu Kaskinen 2017-06-04 22:36:55 UTC

So every Youtube video is too quiet at 100% volume? I don't have experience of many laptops, but to me it sounds weird if many are indeed built with unusably quiet speakers. My guess is that some volume control is just set too low.

Can you set the sink volume to 100%, then play some Youtube video, and while playing the video, run "amixer -c0" and "pactl list" and add the output of those commands as attachments to this bug?

Comment 2 jonatan 2017-06-04 23:50:40 UTC

Created attachment 131699 [details]
Commands output

Comment 3 jonatan 2017-06-04 23:52:04 UTC

(In reply to Tanu Kaskinen from comment #1)
> So every Youtube video is too quiet at 100% volume? I don't have experience
> of many laptops, but to me it sounds weird if many are indeed built with
> unusably quiet speakers. My guess is that some volume control is just set
> too low.
> 
> Can you set the sink volume to 100%, then play some Youtube video, and while
> playing the video, run "amixer -c0" and "pactl list" and add the output of
> those commands as attachments to this bug?

Yes, maybe it is just the problem with Thinkpad laptops? I have heard other say that they have low speakers. Before I knew about the command I sometimes had to boot into Windows to watch videos, where it is possible to increase the volume more.

Comment 4 Arun Raghavan 2017-06-06 05:56:34 UTC

I've noticed this on my x240, but not to the extent that the reporter mentions. I always assumed it was defective hardware here, but perhaps not. At 100%, things are audible but not nearly as loud as I would expect.

Perhaps this is something to bring up on alsa-devel.

Comment 5 Tanu Kaskinen 2017-06-06 13:36:31 UTC

The Firefox stream volume is 49% / -18,52 dB, so increasing that to 100% will provide quite a bit more volume (not as much as pushing the sink volume to 300%, though).

Youtube and other web video players like to set the stream volume by themselves, and last time I looked into this, setting the volume in pavucontrol isn't persistent for these streams (unlike other streams), so if you set it to 100%, the next video will again have 49%. If you change the volume in the player UI, that will likely be remembered, however.

Comment 6 Tanu Kaskinen 2017-06-06 13:38:01 UTC

Forgot to add: the amixer output isn't useful, because I guessed wrong the card index. Try "amixer -c1" instead. The amixer output is useful for checking if there's some hardware volume control that pulseaudio doesn't take into account.

Comment 7 GitLab Migration User 2018-07-30 10:30:46 UTC

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/issues/478.

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