After finding that the user experience with the default Volume Control app in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has gone down hill, I decided to look into this further. Although it is not as bad in the version that comes with Ubuntu 10.10, it still has bad points.

One of them is that it only wants to allow output to one device and only one device. Why is this?

In the latest version, the actual sliders are split up in a way that makes it more difficult to jump between slider ... you have to also jump between tabs more often.

Also, the sliders for each output device are very rough. A movement across a mere 5% of the slider range, somewhere near the middle, goes from silence to extreme volume. That needs to be spread out better, especially on laptops that use touch pads where it is hard to get things moved precisely.

Would a different sound system other than PulseAudio do a better job?

then I suggest your pulseaudio is not correctly setup as one the features is supposed to allow on-the-fly switching of devices.

you could disable pulseaudio from controlling your hardware and just using alsa but since you like pulse you might be better off checking the new version has all its packages and then reconfiguring it?

It does allow on the fly switching. But it's a radio-button kind of selection. It only allows one output device at a time. I want output to go to two devices (two separate headphones).

So where is this configuration? If I go to System > Preferences > Sound I just get the same volume control window that has the radio buttons under the output tab.