When the USB audio device class was created [1], it had support for AVR-like audio controls (volume, balance, tone etc.), and, like would be reasonable, made all that work with decibels. But, as far as I know, that part of the standard got ignored by basically everyone, including some of whom wrote it (Microsoft), by presenting e.g. the on-device volume control as a 0-100 scale, like Windows and ALSA still do. Except... some hardware devices actually implemented the spec, including the PCM29xx family of audio codecs. These, and clones of them, have been used in quite a few USB audio cards and some very low-end audio interface over the decades. And for those, "100" in Windows means something like "+30 dBfs" [2] - so you'll get extreme distortion with basically any signal.
[1] 1.0 is actually impressively complex and basically models the entire stack of audio devices someone could have possibly had in their TV cabinet in the 1995, including stuff like dolby and surround decoders.
When the USB audio device class was created [1], it had support for AVR-like audio controls (volume, balance, tone etc.), and, like would be reasonable, made all that work with decibels. But, as far as I know, that part of the standard got ignored by basically everyone, including some of whom wrote it (Microsoft), by presenting e.g. the on-device volume control as a 0-100 scale, like Windows and ALSA still do. Except... some hardware devices actually implemented the spec, including the PCM29xx family of audio codecs. These, and clones of them, have been used in quite a few USB audio cards and some very low-end audio interface over the decades. And for those, "100" in Windows means something like "+30 dBfs" [2] - so you'll get extreme distortion with basically any signal.
[1] 1.0 is actually impressively complex and basically models the entire stack of audio devices someone could have possibly had in their TV cabinet in the 1995, including stuff like dolby and surround decoders.
[2] This is defined around 5.2.2.2.3 and/or 5.2.2.4.3.2 in https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/audio10.pdf