I would like to revisit this thread.

I have an N810/Diablo and mplayer's audio has never been very good for me. I have played with the soft-vol and audio filter settings in mplayer.conf quite a bit, but I always just drive the audio levels into distortion and yet the audio level isn't even close to what I can cleanly get out of the the Maemo Media Player.

Is there a another volume setting downstream from mplayer that is limiting my volume? (of course the main GUI volumes are up the same when using both programs for comparison).

I noticed the way things are played from each program seems to be very different. Looking at activity shown from the "top" program, I notice activity on from a tasks "osso-media-server" and "DSP/0", while playing in mplayer I instead see activity from tasks "mplayer", "esd", OMAP-SPI/0, and maemo-launcher. I specifically noticed "esd" which I think is "Enlightened Sound Daemon", which is a software multi-stream mixer. I also noticed the OMAP-SPI verses DSP/0 too.

Any clues about this?