I've been running Ubuntu on my Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 for a while now and I've noticed that the volume is about 50% lower than it is on Windows. This goes for my speakers, my wired headphones, and my bluetooth headphones. My headphones are Audio Technica SR50BTs, which have the option of wired and bluetooth. The wired volume isn't terrible, but bluetooth is nearly inaudible when I am below 80% volume.
So far the only thing I have really tried was changing the pulseaudio config around. The default sample format I am using in my pulseaudio daemon.conf is 'float32le'.
I enabled sound over-amplification for when I need louder volume, but there is a fair bit of loss in audio quality. I've looked at a fair amount of forum posts from people with similar issues with linux in general but haven't really found anything that really worked.
I'm assuming the issue is just that the driver for my sound card isn't great, which I can't really do much about. But, if someone else has found a solution to this problem it would be great. Thanks!
alsamixerthat 'Master' output is sufficiently high. It should be turned to at least 75%. The other 2 controls on there, 'PCM' and 'Front' should be set to 100%. If that doesn't improve things, download and install PulseEffects. There's a control on there called 'Autogain' which will give more than enough volume without loss of quality. – Paul Benson Dec 29 '19 at 20:44