I keep noticing that the VU meter that is displayed underneath each set of volume sliders never seem to use more than about 5% (if that) of the defined space for the meter while it's displaying sound levels. I have the sound level set to 50% but the VU meter never seems to use more than about 20 pixels to display sound levels. Adjusting the playback level to 100% does not affect the way the VU meter is displaying sound levels. (It does just about blow out my eardrums, though.)

Is there another level setting somewhere within PA that is misconfigured (i.e., set too low, perhaps)? Or is this just one more oddball thing about PA that we have to live with? Can the PA volume control VU meters be disabled? The way they're working now is pretty worthless, even as eye candy.

This is happening on PulseAudio 1.1-6.1.2 (on OpenSUSE 12.2; an upgrade to 13.2 is coming soon).

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Rick

Pulse Audio commonly runs on top of ALSA.

Have you checked your alsamixer settings? Run alsamixer from the command line.

Nothing had much effect. There were a couple of settings that were maxed out and I lowered them a bit. The level adjustments in alsamixer did have minor affects on the sliders on the PA volume display GUI a bit but did nothing to the VU meter.

I'm sure someone on the PA team thought the meter was a great idea but it looks to me like it's just a waste of CPU cycles. (Sigh)

I think it is just that the PulseAudio metre is as much of a waste of time as the rest of the software.
Sadly, we're stuck with it.