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Is there someway to ensure the real audio output level, not whatever the slider say but in actual decibels, will never go above a certain threshold?

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No, because the real audio output level is determined by the speakers, after the sound data leaves the computer. Many speakers have their own builtin volume control knobs, for example, which could be used to scale the output from the computer's sound chip to any decibel level (within a wide range).

Why do you want to do this?

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I use headphones and need to adjust audio for different apps/websites. When I go from one to another, sometimes it is too loud, at least until I can lower the volume. – gerund Jul 1 '10 at 0:03
Ah, then you should probably be looking for a volume normalizer, which attempts to adjust different audio sources so that they all have about the same average volume (although it can't tell you what decibel level that volume will correspond to). ReplayGain does this for digital music files, but it's something you have to pre-apply to the tracks. I don't know of any software that does it in real time. (Some TVs claim to do it, so an algorithm must exist somewhere) – David Zaslavsky Jul 1 '10 at 0:09
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Or an audio compressor which makes the loud not as loud. This can be done through hardware or software (JACK has the capability of doing this). – Dan Jul 1 '10 at 4:19
@Dan: good idea, I forgot about that possibility. – David Zaslavsky Jul 1 '10 at 4:24
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