Take your hands off my PCM mixer, you damn dirty pulseaudio apes.

Touching my stupid thinkpad volume keys had been boosting PCM mixer setting to 100%, which usually makes the system sound terrible. Stumbled on this Karmic bug/FAQ:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/420578

sudo sed -i.bak -e ’s/volume = merg/volume = ignore/’ /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/*analog*