I’ve had very low sound levels for some weeks now. I have a set of usb speakers, I used to listen to everything with volume set to 30-45%. But for a couple of months I have had very low volume. I now have to go to 80% to be barely audible, but then it goes up from there very fast.
I searched a bit on the internet and people talk about setting the levels using alsamixer, but when I do that I see that it matches the master volume level I’m adjusting from my desktop (XFCE). What changed? How can I fix this?
EDIT: same results if I try to adjust the hardware volume knob on my speakers.
Try sudo journalctl -b 0 | grep "sticky mixer" and I suspect you might see some entries.
If so, it’s a change in USB audio handling in kernel 7.1.x that affects various USB devices (including mine). In my case, I see lowered volume like you, and I can’t set the sidetone to anything other than 0% or 100%, which for me makes the device unusable for video calls.
Kernel 7.2.x adds a quirk flag which will enable this behaviour to be reverted using a modprobe config.
For now, do you have a kernel 7.0.x available that you can boot from?
I don’t get any matches for “sticky mixer”. I also searched through older journals using --since 2026-05-01, no matches. Sadly, all my 5 kernels are in the 7.1.x series. But I’ll check if the repo still has something 7.0.x.
