Comment 9 for bug 1440675

The manual it too far away to fix this instant issue. From my experience the novice user did not know that there are hardware mixer on the sound card, so he probably has no idea what to look for in the manual.

If we follow Be's suggestion and open alsamixer with the master soundcard selected and in "all" view, the button offers some extra value.

@Max, do you alternative idea to improve this situation?

How about a short hint in the hardware preferences:
"Be sure the sound card mixer are set up. This can be checked using "alsamixer" from the command line."

Or

"Read in the sound card manual how to setup the sound card mixer"