Sound volume very high; SDL lib issue?

I don't think this is a bug in shockolate but I'd like to document my experience here for anyone else with the same problem.

On my windows pc, the game sound is very loud compared to, say a video playing in firefox. This seems to be a result of the change of SDL version (possibly in combination with some bug in my sound driver?). In my sound settings (I'm using a sound blasterX g6), if I set output from 5.1 or 7.1 to stereo, the volume becomes normal.