Sound card initialisation and normalisation

Sound cards vary widely in the way they interpret volume information. We would like to understand how best to ensure that every machine has sound settings "just working" out of the box. This discussion should consider microphone settings, and all the various knobs exposed by the alsamixer and Gnome/KDE mixing systems. Perhaps we need to capture recommended settings from advanced users in a central repository for the distro? And perhaps we need a way for people to get the "recommended settings" for their particular soundcard, with a central repository which can be updated after release capturing that data?