Why does the volume option often have over 100%?

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I’m very new to linux and have only tried out 2 distros so far. Both had sound volume options greater than 100%, and from what I can gather this seems to be common in most distros?

My question is, why? As a new user it just seems like a spinal tap “these go to 11” type thing. It’s there a specific reason for this that I’ve not come across yet? I can’t see why they don’t just go to 100% with the same actual volume range…

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I’ve often wondered this, too.

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I can only guess, but i think that you should think of volume greater than 100% as overamplification. Sound quality could be distorted if you go past 100%.

As the reasoning why it is there by default. I have no idea.

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Exactly.

In fact if you only use the older Alsa there is no option like that IIRC. It came with Pulse, what is now widely used on any Linux distribution.

I find it very handy because sometimes movies or an audio file of worse quality can be too quiet.
One example is when I am in the kitchen and watch a Netflix show on my laptop, the audio of some shows is too quiet especially in a cooking environment. Of course it can and will distort the sound.

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I don’t use > 100% for audio output but I’ve had situations where raising it for a microphone was necessary.

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It is actually very useful, although not common in other operating systems. Sometimes you have some media or even you are on a conference call at work and the sound is super quiet - being able to over-amplify means you can hear it much better. This is generally not useful for music where it will likely be distorted but certainly is a really useful feature for every day tech life.

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I think this for laptops.

A lot of laptops are getting thinner and thinner. I got an HP laptop which is so thin, they just slapped the battery pack in a plastic back and stuck it in. HP included some special third party software with it just for those speakers. I disabled it once. Then the speakers no only sounded terrible, i could barely hear them.

I also have a mid range laptop in which sometimes I cannot hear a video playing so I use that 150% to get it si a sound level I can hear.

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Ahhh Yes that makes sense actually, the sound on my new laptop is pretty terrible, it’s very quiet and I’ve found myself having to max out the volume on a few occasions.

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