Low Volume Out Of The Box

[blaubär]

One further note on "DVC" : this seems to be a special effect of the High-Res OpenSL ES driver. On some devices, especially Samsung, the use of this driver seems to lead to restrictions as to what sample sizes and sample rates can be chosen. DVC seems to play a role in this context ( and might imho together with OpenSL ES better be avoided ). See the following discussions :

adaptive sampling
usb-c-sampling
sample rate and size

It also seems that it's not DVC that circumvents the os-sound-effects, but the use of sample sizes > 16 bit. As to what "Direct Volume Control" does : it just seems to remove some 6 dB headroom somewhere, but as we see from the comparison PowerAmp vs. Neutron this headroom seems to be a special effect of OpenSL ES too, so in Neutron there's no need to remove it.

In short : "DVC" is the solution to a problem that Neutron doesn't have.

[...]
OpenSL ES
OpenSL ES driver is considered obsolete since 1.97.0 due to its low capabilities and format limitation.
[...]

Edit : it seems that in PowerAmp you can also switch on DVC with AudioTrack output ... resulting in the same volume as with Neutron ... so maybe this is a general feature of Android that Neutron uses without problems or which Neutron doesn't use but does things differently with the same result and which sometimes causes problems with PowerAmp's use of the High-Res-OpenSL-ES-driver ...

Edit : and the use of DVC in PowerAmp with AudioTrack indeed prevents the os sound effects from working ... which you can control in Neutron via Audio Hardware > DSP Effect (Device) without getting a change in volume