Now, the fun part; every sound begins loud (or should I say at a normal level) and then is almost imediately attenuated, resulting in annoyance and really low volume in general. With dmasound-pmac the volume used to be a lot louder and didn't had this kind of issues.Sounds like DRC. Disable it or yank up its range with a mixer app.
I use "alsamixer" to turn off DRC. But each two reboots I need to turn it off again, because the system reboots with DRC on. Do you have the same problem?
Friendly, -- Eugen Dedu