Fedora 41: Sound is muted below volume threshold

I did a fresh installation of Fedora and everything is working fine, except I have a problem with my sound settings and I can’t figure out what’s going on.

When I set my volume below a certain threshold (20%), the sound is muted completely. This seems to happen with both my USB headset and with the integrated speakers of my laptop.

I did a lot of research but everything I tried to fix this problem didn’t help. Maybe someone has an idea what could be the potential problem?

Specs:

  • Fedora 41 x86_64
  • Kernel: 6.13.6-200.fc41.x86_64

Welcom to the forums.

Please tell us what research you did and what you tried or else we have to go through all that easy stuff again.

Sure, here are some things I tried (or at least those I remember I tried):

ALSA ignore dB
I often read that setting the ALSA property api.alsa.ignore-dB to true fixes this problem, but either this didn’t work in my case or I was configuring it wrong. What I did was I created the file /etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-low-volume-fix.lua with the following content:

table.insert (alsa_monitor.rules, {
    matches = {
      { { "device.name", "matches", "alsa_card.*" }, },
    },
    apply_properties = {
      ["api.alsa.ignore-dB"] = true,
    },
})

But this didn’t change a thing. I also tried to change this setting in some other ways according to some threads I found on the Internet, but they also didn’t work (e.g. adding a WirePlumber config file in ~/.config/wireplumber/ and put the settings in there). To be honest I am not very familiar with ALSA, PipeWire WirePlumber so I was not really sure what I was doing. Maybe that’s the main problem here. :face_with_peeking_eye:

pavucontrol
I also installed the PulseAudio Volume Control and tried different settings there, like using a different audio profile, but nothing helped.

Analog/Digital audio output
I switched between Analog and Digital audio output and did some tests there, but this also did not work.

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