Does one have to be a sound engineer?

[Timothy Murphy]

max bianco wrote:

>> Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working
>> at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
> 
> I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums.
>  Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.

Windows doesn't seem to worry about that.
As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker -
I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.

> I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well.
> Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something like that)

I'm using KDE, and don't see any setting like this in the main menu.
The only sound application there is KMix,
which does not seem to offer anything along those lines.

The only other application that I can see to control sound
is System Settings=>Sound
and I don't see anything similar there either.

(Incidentally, I would have thought the default was always ALSA -
what else could it be?)