Can you hear me now?

First of all, on most drivers we have dB information. Hence setting anything to 100% or so is a bad idea. What makes more sense, as I already tried to make clear is to initialize to 0dB using that information. Forget about the % scale. If we habe the dB scale volume controls actually start to make sense!

And I often made clear that I think that onboard audio is more than good and is what I am focussing on. So if you claim we'd care only about proper external sound cards: that's complete and utter nonsense.