Low sound volumes on PPC G4 dual New World

[Zugwrack]

I have checked alsamixer from console, the sound is very low for
system sounds. Using xmms to check further I see that sound is very
distorted coming from xmms streamed audio. I have tried adjusting
different settings all to no avail..and yes xmms is configured to use
ALSA and not OSS.... This is PPC and irc only showed 1 person who
replied they are using Mac...is there a way to fix this problem? I
love Ubuntu except for this one little annoying problem...