Did you notice how louder the speakers are compared to the audio jack output? Whatever the size of headphones I use, I have troubles to hear quiet music in a loud environment which wasn't the case with my previous MP3 player which wasnt at the maximum volume anyway. D:

Seriously, I feel I could become deaf if I stick my ear to the speakers, but when I do the same with headphones, never in a billion years I'll feel any ear fatigue. :|

Any mod I could do to the output jack to increase the signal? Resistor, capacitor, whatever, etc.

Isn't it something to do with that European volume limiting thing portable music players have, to 'protect' our hearing?

One thing worthy of note: The volume is automatically lowered something like 10% when you plug the headphones in; so even if you had it turned up all the way, turn it back up after plugging them in.

The headset supplied with the n800 has the loudest volume for me, but still not loud enough. I´ve tried other headsets,but most of them are not as loud as the supplied one. Can this be resolved with a software hack ?

Related note: if I tablet-encode DVDs for my kids to watch on airplane rides, the volume is far too low to be audible during flight on headphones. Things "borrowed" from the torrents and tablet-encoded fare a bit better. In practice it works out to 'Cars' without volume, or Yo Gabba Gabba without headphones... is there a way to rescale the audio by software?

Regarding "software hacks":

For playback purposes, there's been some discussion about soft-volume boosts in various players. XMMS works, but that's audio only. Mplayer works; Canola can be set up with mplayer as audio and video backend; that's the most general and widely accepted solution.

For mp3s, however, I highly recommend using mp3gain to losslessly boost and homogenize the volume levels.

Thnx for the info benson,
But what about getting the volume up in the media player ?
I´m listening to internet audio steams with the media player and the volume is still not loud enough. Still using chinook.
Thnx

Well, if you chance to be running Debian, you can use gnome-alsamixer to crank it up further. Failing that, or some other way to access full ALSA controls, I don't know anything for the built-in media player. I'd recommend not using it; you can use mplayer, and any front-ends for that, or xmms, if either of them can handle the stream format...

You can try installing aumix.

The default system volume is 93. When you plug the headphones, the volume is lowered to 83. You can force it to 93 (or more) with aumix.