Comment 35 for bug 322909

IMHO, regardless this is caused by hardware or not, the behaviour of Pulseaudio's volume control is too complicated. It is not clear which tracks are controlled and in what order. After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 sound and media keys worked out of the box (good job for this). However, the volume control using the gnome-applet resp. media keys was,
let's say weired. Pulseaudio lowered the master volume first, then the PCM channel and the headphone channel (which I use as output) last. This resulted in a nearly constant volume level over the whole volume range (in the gnome panel) - not linear variying or something similar. It tooks me several hours of investigations to find the solution proposed above. I set the Master and PCM channel to 'ignore', set the desired levels in 'alsamixer' and everything is nice. This must be simplified by adding a graphical interface or emphasizing the Pulseaudio documentation. Especially beginners go crazy with such issues.