From Fedora Project Wiki
any hope this will finally also address the inability to configure 5.1 type setups?
I'm concerned that these changes will make it harder to adjust individual hardware mixer channels which is currently necessary because ALSA just sets the default values to 50% or something like that. What is being done to address this? I fail to see how hiding/simplifiying hardware mixer channels in ALSA is going to improve this situation. - cra
Making sure that alsa settings are sane is part of this effort. Also note that upstream alsa is working on setting up a database (quirks, if you want) of default volume levels for different cards. So there is hope that alsa will provide more sensible defaults in the future. MatthiasClasen