GarageBand on iPad Pro M1 - is the volume output being turned down now?

All it is, I make music using GarageBand on my iPad Pro M1 13”, used to use an iPad Pro 2 but upgraded. Have a ‘system’ if I can describe it as that, where I use a Belkin HD Express Dock normally used with Mac systems back in the day etc, but it serves to take my iPad Pro solitary Thunderbolt input/output and once into the Belkin dock, there are various outputs and inputs there for me to use.

Via this setup, a 3.5mm headphone jack is used, (3-ring connector) to send the GB output down a cable to the big Busker amp combo (mono) speaker I have. The Busker amp does the combining of the stereo inside it. There is a separate 3.5mm connection at the front of the Belkin, which takes a familiar 4-ring connector ie there’s a microphone input this way. This is how I record vocals into the iPad Pro M1.

It’s very quiet out to the Busker amp now. The busker amp combo has a 15” main speaker and a tweeter arrangement above.

It’s a lot of power and I am sat right in front of it.

I turned off all the volume-diminishing controls I can find inside of ‘settings’ on my iPadOS 18.7.1 so there’s no limit to 100dB ‘like an ambulance siren’, and there’s no headphone protection level on.

In fact, in GarageBand, I couldn’t get the headphone protection level, to make ANY change anyway - tried right from down at max of 30% right up to 90%. The output via the busker was neither reduced nor let rip.

I am just wondering if something has been altered recently, that limits the output from GB on iPad even more - has the auto-normalise been tweaked, in some way? Obviously I’d like to be able to knock the auto-normalize off like lower-rent customers on very cheap old Mac computers can, as well as force use of the inboard speakers but these are probably not the issue.

I told the iPad Pro when it asked, way back, that the output was to a pair of earphones (the choice was ‘earphones’ or ‘other’). I did this as the output on my old iPad Pro 2 had been fine, so I just wanted that to continue, although of course, that went out via a separate 3.5mm headphone jack.

I attach a pic showing the extremely high setting I have to have GB at inside of a song, to make the busker amp combo output a moderate volume. It’s around 9/10 if it had graticules, on the main volume at the top of the screen in GB song editor.

I had to turn up the input volume rotary control on the Busker amp already, from 2/3 to nearly max, to try and compensate, quite some time ago. It feels like I am fighting a continual attenuation battle!

I know it’s not deliberate as such. It’s at the stage I am having to consider a separate pre-amp or something between the Belkin Dock and the Busker amp 3.5mm input on the back.

Any insights would be appreciated.