Disable PulseAudio flat volumes to prevent it from pushing volume level to max

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2015-09-21 at 18:00 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> There is danger to the ears if an application assumes that 100%
> volume
> is a safe volume and blindly sets its volume to 100% without user
> input. But that only affects that application - one application's
> misbehavior never affects another application.

That's definitely not correct. With flat volumes, applications can and
do set the system volume to 100%. I've received numerous complaints
about this. It's particularly frustrating when watching YouTube videos,
since YouTube sets the system volume to 1 when starting a video. We are
still waiting for some promised "browsers API" in PulseAudio to fix
this easily.

I think it's telling that this thread is full of complaints about flat
volumes, with no supporters. Also, Ubuntu does not seem to be getting
any complaints about the lack of flat volumes. :)

Michael