Frank,
I played a bit with it last night. One thing I notice is that your version of alsamixer is newer than mine. Mine reports v1.0.28 and yours appears to be v1.0.29 Don't know of that has anything to do with it.
If I select Hardware Volume from the mpd settings page, I can no longer adjust volume from the UI, it just pops back to 0, but I can adjust the volume from alsamixer 'PCM' level adjustment. It behaves like the others have said about hardware volume where it has very little output below 50%, and gets quite loud and clips above 95%.
Keith
