why pcm is set to 75% by default?

[lapsio]

Excuse me, I've got Asus Xonar D2 and on fresh installed OSS4 it's got 75% pcm volume. Is it necessary? I've read that in original windows drivers it's for 0db gain, but generally Xonar sounds on Windows much louder, so is it on Xonar 75%, or "75%" of 75% set in windows drivers? I think that when I've set 100% on pcm I haven't noticed any noises in sound. In fact I've switched to OSS from ALSA just because of on ALSA my integrated sound card was about 2 times louder than Xonar and I had to set 100% volume on my speakers. And It sounded a bit awful because of quite bad quality amplifier in Solo 6C.

I've written script to switch between pcm 75:75, vmix0 18 and pcm 100:100, vmix 10.5 (it's the same loudness) and I can't hear any difference. Does it mean, that I can set pcm 100:100 and operate only vmix volume without losing any sound quality? Won't it be harmful for soundcard or something?

[seawright]

On a clean install all mixer sliders are set at approx 75% to prevent audio shock when the drivers are first enabled. The only possible damage with using 100% volume is to your ears however depending on the quality of PAs/Loud Speakers there may be some distortion at high volume levels.

There should not be any requirement to write a script to set the volume levels, just adjust them to your requirement so that when "soundoff" is run (either manually or by the shutdown script) mixer settings are saved to file and will be reloaded the next time "soundon" is run.