Ubuntu – Volume control not working

The maximal possible volume level we can obtain from sliding the volume control to more than 100% is approx. 153% above the normal peak limit. Provided we had set the ALSA volume with alsamixer to 100 these 100% are the level above which audio will be clipped or distorted. This also will happen when amplifying to 153% with the slider.

Nevertheless is is possible to further increase this level by setting the sink level using the follwing command in a terminal:

pacmd set-sink-volume <sink> <value>

Replace <sink> with your sink name or sink index as given from:

pacmd list-sinks

The lower limit for <value> obviously is 0, a linear volume of 100% is a value of 65536, anything higher will be further amplified. A value of 512000 will thus lead to an overamplification of 781%.

This is a very crude method to amplify sound output of varying level as overamplifying will lead not only to clipping and ugly distortion but may also damage your speakers.

Therefore it would be a better way to normalize your audio output. See the following question on how to do this with pulseaudio:

• Automatically adjust the volume based on content?

I had the same issue. I was able to fix it using the following steps:

1. Removed ~/.config/pulse directory.

2. Started Pulse Audio.

   rm -rf ~/.config/pulse
   pulseaudio --start
   

Incase if its still showing errors you will have to reinstall pulse audio and equalizer.

sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-equalizer
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-equalizer
pulseaudio --start