I'm going to admit up front that this problem isn't limited to just Amarok, so maybe this isn't the best place to post it, but I'm not sure where I should be looking, so if you all can't help, maybe you can at least point me in the right direction.

The problem is this: when the volume in Amarok is set to over about 70%, I start getting lots of distortion on certain songs.  It is most noticeable on rap, but happens on loud rock songs as well.  It is not affected by the system volume level, just the internal Amarok volume (when I turn it down, the problem pretty much goes away).  I'm using the xine engine (most recent release), and Amarok 1.4.2 (although it happens with 1.3 as well).  Now here's the weird part: the same problem occurs on all my other media players (totem, BMP, xine-ui, VLC) except Rhythmbox.  This made me think that the problem lay in xine, but when I removed replaced totem-xine with totem-gstreamer, it still had the problem (gstreamer is the engine Rhythmbox uses).  I have the latest ALSA drivers installed (plus the problem still happened when I told Amarok to use ECD instead), and I have both xine and gstreamer set to use ALSA, so I don't think that could be the problem.  Like I said, I realize this isn't an Amarok-specific problem, but I'm stumped as to where the problem could even reside. Anyone have ideas?

It's usually simple to fix: Fire up an audio mixer app (e.g. KMix), and set the PCM volume slider to about 80%, and the master volume to 100%. It's crucial that PCM is not at 100%, since this leads to distortions with many sound cards.

Then you should be able to set Amarok to any volume without problems.