Can I increase the sound volume above 100% in Linux?

I am running KDE 4.6 in Debian Testing. Is there a way to increase the sound (i.e. more than the standard 100%)? The current settings with my speakers seem a bit too quiet in some cases.

I found a way to do it in PulseAudio, but I don't think Debian's KDE build is compatible.

Have you tried changing the various channels through alsamixer? (run it from the terminal)

You may also want to check your PulseAudio settings. There's a GUI front-end package called pavucontrol that allows you to easily change these settings.

The answer is yes you can, install pulseaudio, on debian like for example

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pavucontrol

Increasing volume using gui

just open pavucontrol and scroll the volume bar

Increasing volume programmatically

Use the command below to increase the audio

pactl -- set-sink-volume $SINK +110%

where $SINK is the number of the audio channel, it can be 0, 1, 2, N. To check the available channels you can use

pactl list | grep 'Sink'

I,ve made the following command to automatically detect the audio channels and increase the volume by 3%

pactl list | grep -oP 'Sink #\K([0-9]+)' | while read -r i ; do pactl -- set-sink-volume $i +3% ; done

Make sure to restart you computer after install pulseaudio

I have raised audio volume above 100% using gnome-volume-control. However, this only works from the Audio Settings dialog and if you ever change the volume from the applet it drops back to 100% and won't go above it again.

Never tried it in KDE.

Lol what great answers..."buy louder speakers...its a motherboard problem". Sorry to say but this is 100% an ALSA problem. A little googling will show you that this problem has existed since at least 2004 and the ALSA community doesn't seem to care very much about fixing it. I (as well as countless others) have even dual-booted and tried the same sound files back to back in linux and windows with linux always coming out much quieter. I suspect that Apple and Microsoft use a brickwall limiter in their audio signal chain, thus allowing them to push pre-amp volume a bit over "100%" without causing clipping. You are supposed to be able to add a Pre-Amp control to the alsamixer (http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding-an-alsa-software-pre-amp-to-fix-low-sound-levels/) but I have yet to get it working with Debian so far. I am annoyed that the ALSA wiki doesn't even mention this extremely common problem...

That's not a KDE issue. But the short answer is "No." If all of your volumes are set at 100%, then they're already at their max.

The exception to this rule, is that the sound stream itself can be modified--generally by compressing the dynamic range of the audio, so that quiet sounds seem louder. Technically, this degrades the sound quality, but may be what PulseAudio (whatever that is--I've never heard of it) does.

Your best bet is probably to buy better/more amplified speakers.

EDIT: I don't know of anything that does dynamic range compression, as mentioned above, on they fly in Linux, but ALSA is very configurable, so I'm sure it could be done with enough research and effort. But at my hourly pay rate, I could buy a lot of really nice speakers for the time it would take me to figure out how to do it in ALSA... and the results would be better with new speakers.