Headphone volume

T

tOsYZYny

I play the drums and I used to use my headphones (with earplugs) to play the drums such that the level would be sufficient for me to hear the music over the drums. I'm not quite sure when, but I am unable to get the same sort of volume output I once did. I'm not sure if that is back when I was running Linux. My hardware setup has not changed.

I am using aumix to control the volume. When running aumix with no args, it appears the volume and PCM are maxed out.

Is there something else I need to toggle?
 
That is entirely possible as I probably would have been using pulseaudio in Linux. I am using the default in FreeBSD, sndio?
 
tOsYZYny said:
I am using the default in FreeBSD, sndio?
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I think that depends on how your music application was compiled. I have KDE plasma and firefox that use pulse audio, whereas my vlc does not use pulse audio; all binary packages installed with pkg. The options used in a binary package can be listed with pkg info <package-name>.
 
tOsYZYny said:
I play the drums and I used to use my headphones (with earplugs) to play the drums ...
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Earplugs under over-ear headphones? First time I hear that combination, but I'm only a casual drummer.

drr said:
I think pulse audio allows over-amplifying volume above 100%. Is it possible that your previous set up did that?
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VLC can over-amplify too, directly on OSS without any sound servers in between. May be worth a try, there can be distortion from clipping though.
 
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I'm not even a casual drummer, I get a few minutes here and there. Earplugs with over-the-ear headphones works great to balance the volume of the music with my drums.

Yeah, I think I used vlc before and it is different than whatever I had used in Linux. It was distortion free, and clear as could be. My hardware isn't identical, but I would imagine it should perform the same.

I think I probably manually started pulseaudio when I last used Linux as I was using i3 then and everything was very manual.

I generally use mpv to play audio and out of the box with pkg, it does not have pulseaudio or alsa support.
 
Whatever works for you (and protects your ears) is fine, it just never occurred to me - all my friends use in-ear monitors for musicians when playing a real kit, the good ones bring down sound levels enough so you don't have to crank up the volume.

The problem with over-amplification on the software side is that the loudest parts will be clipped when the level exceeds what the sample size (16bit, 24bit) can handle. Usually that distorts the sound, but maybe pulseaudio and / or VLC have some clever limiter built in to avoid that. Still audible artifacts, but less annoying.

The in-kernel mixer in FreeBSD defaults to 16bit@48000Hz, if your sound card has a different native format you could try to adjust the vchanformat and vchanrate sysctl knobs you find under sysctl dev.pcm.
 
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