I have a HP Pavilion dv5t running Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. My problem is that the volume range on the Master, Front, and Headphones seems to be scrunched up towards the top of the slider, meaning that in order to get any sound at all I have to go past 50 percent. Once I go past 50 percent, every notch in the slider increases the volume by a large degree, therefore not allowing me to have finer control over the volume. This is very annoying since pressing the volume up button once on my keyboard can increase the volume to an unbearable level. Only the PCM slider works properly. The only reason why I have not switched Kmix to use it is because it does not control everything and it has no mute capability.

I've had this issue with several Linux distributions now. I fixed the issue in OpenSuSE 11.1 by getting new ALSA drivers, however. I was wondering if there was an easy way to fix this in Kubuntu, whether its editing config files or getting new ALSA packages.

The sound controlers are not stand alone controlers .
What you can do is playing with the settings that it became acceptable
If you put them all at maximum level you have a good change that the sound is too loud and out
of control

That sounds like most laptops soundcards to me. And I would deem normal behavior. I generally set my laptop to 85% and leave it alone. Any more and the sound degrades, any less and it's not easy listening. For my desktop, I have the output piped through a headphone preamp with monitor attenuation (Presonus HP4). And my speakers themselves have volume knobs, so not much of an issue for me. If I need volume control I can use my USB M-Audio Mobile Pre for sound on the laptop (or desktop) that also has a volume knob.

Baring all of that set your volume to where it sounds good and sort of maxed, then use the softvol stuff to adjust the levels in software, not hardware. It's something you put in your .asoundrc and has parameters / config file options to be used by common players like xmms and mplayer. And it's adjustments are fairly even, even if your hardware adjustments are not.

HTH

I've played around with the different sliders in Kmix, which essentially is a frontend for alsamixer, but I still have the problem. I am not sure how to edit asoundrc either.