There is bug with the headphone volume, in which the dB gain values remain at 88% when they should always be at 100%. I could go into a lot of the other technical problems I observed with pulse audio, but thats not the point of this thread.

A simple work around to the headphone bug, for the time being is to use this command.

amixer set headphone 100%

to get the headphone dB gain values back up to 100%.

The problems with this however is, percentage resets to 88% when, you either unplug your headphones, make a phone call, use the volume keys. etc, etc. There's many things that triggers a drop.

To combat this you'd have to manually make a widget using either queen beecon, or desktop execution widget to issue the command.

amixer set headphone 100%

each time headphone resets to 88%, which is still highly annoying

God knows I tried everything to combat that cursed bug, i even tried redirecting pulse audio streams and files to no avail. But I haven't given up just yet. lol

Use this command to have a fair idea of what I'm speaking about (and plug in your headphones):

alsamixer -c0