One of the first issue I noticed when daily driving a Linux machine is that my cheap JA11 confusingly outputting less than its half volume even when setting the master volume and all the mixer sliders to full.

But then I found out that there’s another hidden mixer settings that at the time, I wasn’t aware of; alsamixer and pavucontrol, choose either, according to the current sound server you’re running. alsamixer if you’re running on pipewire and pavucontrol if you’re running on PulseAudio.

In my case, I’m running pipewire, so just type alsamixer on your console and you should be greeted with a modest TUI:

Navigate to your active DAC by pressing F6

And there we have it! The PCM level was set to 30 for unknown reason, CRANK IT TO 100!