Wrong dB measurements for SoundBlaster Play! USB audio

[Oto Šťáva]

I'm using Linux Mint 16 Petra MATE edition. My USB audio card Creative SoundBlaster Play! has wrong dB measures, resulting in it muting on non-zero (specifically on 36% and lower) volume values and overall "inefectivity" of volume control (increments of the remaining values being too small).
I experience this behavior when using PulseAudio as well as ALSA and Jack. Testing with dbverify (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Backends/ALSA/Decibel/) revealed strange dealing with wider volume ranges - higher volumes are quiet and distorted.

[Matthis Krause (matthiskrause)]

I'm experiencing exactly the same issues.

I'm using Arch Linux.

Kernel: 3.17.3-1-ARCH
ALSA: version 1.0.28

This is probably a driver issue, isn't it?
Did you find a workaround?

[Oto Šťáva (oto-stava)]

It is definitely a driver issue, I can't think of any other reason why this could be happening.
Sadly, I could not find any workaround for this. I think (from what I've read on the internet) that the measurements just need to be adjusted but I have no idea how to do that, I've never actually looked at Linux's source code or any stuff of this kind.

[Dane Elwell (dane-elwell)]

I can confirm I'm having the same issue on Fedora 22, so this is likely going to be a problem from upstream.

Where and which upstream, I don't know. :/

[Dane Elwell (dane-elwell)]

Actually after more Googling I've found a solution here:

https://chrisjean.com/fix-for-usb-audio-is-too-loud-and-mutes-at-low-volume-in-ubuntu/

Also follow the link to the Arch forums and make the changes detailed there.

For me, however, I had to set the volume-limit option to 20 rather than 0.01 to get reasonable volume control. Not sure if this is because of changes in the latest version of PA/ALSA or not, though. Best to start with their recommended 0.01 option in case you blow your ears off.