This How To is for those people who have trouble with the gnome volume control:
Problem: whenever I change the volume, it does not affect the speaker's loudness at all - just mute (or volume 0) is recognized, but whenever the volume is at some level above 0, the speaker's seem to have full volume.
Possible reason: the new gnome volume control solely controls the pulseaudio sound driver, while several tools still use the alsa sound driver (for me this was even banshee, vlc, ...). For some PCs the forwarding of the volume change in pulseaudio is not correctly forwarded to alsa: the volume change *is* forwarded to the alsa's 'Master' channel, but this is not correct for some PCs - there it has to be the 'PCM' channel.
Check if you have this problem: open a terminal and run 'alsamixer', which is a text-based volume control for all alsa-channels. Therein, you should at least see the channels 'Master', 'Speaker' and 'PCM'. Playback some music and use the arrow keys to change the alsa volumes directly. You might recognize that the PCM volume is the correct one for your needs, while the Master has no effect. Now change the volume using gnome's volume control: you see a simultaneous change of the 'Master' volume bar in the alsamixer, while PCM is always rised to full power. Thus, the problem is that the gnome volume control should control the PCM channel, while it does control the Master channel.
Solution for this problem: tell pulseaudio to let its master volume not steer the alsa 'Master', but the alsa 'PCM' channel. Open and edit with root rights the following file:
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sudo nano /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common
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[Element PCM]
switch = mute
volume = merge
override-map.1 = all
override-map.2 = all-left,all-right
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[Element Master]
switch = mute
volume = ignore
Open problem: at my PC, the headphones are steered by the alsa 'Speaker' channel, which is left to maximum volume (however, fortunately my headphones have their own analog volume control). For now, I didn't find a configuration to let multiple alsa volume channels get steered simultaneously, although it should be possible according to the comments in the above file. I think the best configuration would be to let the gnome volume control steer the 'Speaker' and the 'PCM' channel, but I was not able to configure this. The perfect solution would be to fix the 'volume = merge' or 'volume = <number>' attribute for alsa, so that it is possible to build a simultaneously working volume slave group in alsa. Any further help on this is appreciated! Finally, I think the main problem is that alsa does not use its 'Master' channel as it should, namely, as the master volume for all of its playback channels. If alsa would, then this problem would not exist at all.