It is great. I actually was a heavy critic of pulseaudio and stuck with ALSA on my desktop for as long as I could (until last year) by using Gentoo with USE="alsa -pulseaudio", the X-Fi’s hardware mixing and automatic S/PDIF passthrough.

I tried to switch to pulseaudio a couple of times whenever I read one of those “it’s good now, trust me bro” articles, but it wasn’t, ever. It had and still has a huge amount of hard-coded, opinionated, often perplexing, behavioral quirks that made it feel like it just fought me every step of the way.

Pipewire on the other hand does not only have saner defaults, almost everything is softcoded with a great Lua plugin API. Don’t like a default routing choice or want to automate your own, Wireplumber got you covered. Last year my X-Fi failed (or rather got flakey) and I had to choose between buying another used one or moving to PW. Almost everything worked out of the box on PW the way I like it, except a few details which were almost all covered by the settings. For the last problem, encoded streams not clearing the output, I wrote my own routing plugin.

The documentation for that API isn’t necessarily the best, but it’s easy to start from something small and work your way to understanding how to get the result you want.

Its your DE that controls the volume steps, if that’s what you’re asking. On Ubuntu its shift + volume.

If it’s a pure DAC, it’s default output will likely be between 1 to 2 Volts RMS. If your listening on iems or ~30 Ohm headphones that is gonna be crazy loud. It seems like you are using digital audio control to manage this (i.e., the audio level in your DE), which is possible, but certainly not ideal. It also is kinda bad for the audio quality, as you are digitally remixing it, and if you ever switch to high impedance headphones (or already have), the output current will be sub-ideal.

If I’m assessing your situation correctly, then this is quite easy to solve though. You just need a preamp! This will give a nice knob to control audio with much more precision and finesse. I know that both JDS Labs and Schiit Audio offer headphone amps with built in preamps in the USA. I can highly recommend the JDS Labs Atom Amp 2. In Europe your a little more limited, but FiiO has some nice options I think.

Of course none of this is necessary if you don’t want audiophile levels of quality, but it would boost the audio quality (presuming your DAC doesn’t have a proper preamp), and would certainly give you a tactile, wonderful knob.

I can certainly attest that my HD600s sound quite a bit better out of a JDS Labs Atom Amp 2 than out of just my DAC or—god forbid—my Mobo audio… They sound even better out of my vintage 100W Onkyo amp, of course, but really not by much. I am really impressed by the Atom Amp. I initially just bought it for travelling, but it has now basically become my main amp lol.

Okay, ramble over.