I thought I would ask questions here before I go haring off in the dark.

When I am not using headphones, I play my sound quite low as I live in an apartment house. It is frustrating that when an advertisement comes on, the sound generally surges to very loud and this is a problem when I am listening at midnight.

When I was working, I sometimes worked on huge audio, sometimes in excess of 1000 watts audio systems used in the factory. One of the systems had a "Compression Amplifier" that kept the volume of pages from going too loud. Some people would page at acceptable levels while others would shake the walls by literally yelling. Page levels were difficult to manage because some of the machinery was at the level of a 50 Calibre machine gun.

In the 21st century, no one seems familiar with the concept of a Compression Amplifier, or Volume Limiting Amplifier. To add to the difficulty, my sound is through the USB port, though I have a 1/8 inch audio port. I't rather not use volume limiting software because someone will just write defeating software for it.

Can anyone set direction for me?

Gwen