* Mute is alright. But faders are not relative. You can't "soften everything down to 0".
This is a hardware + software problem. A manufacturing evil. We're getting all laptops these days with no hardware-level volume controller - it's either sensor or nothing. And we all know, to have a non-analogue controller means we need software to interface with that sensor. The problem here is with the huge variety of sound chipsets, with which ALSA has a hard time to keep up.
If you're facing this with a desktop, though, it's more of software.