How come on most of my stereos/TV I’ve owned, when you turn the volume down all the way, or even mute them, YOU CAN STILL HEAR it? If I wanted to hear them at a low volume, I’d turn it down low.
Are you using a final power amp stage to drive your speakers? Even electronic mute circuitry often leaves a tiny signal on the line that you can hear if the room is very quiet and you press your ear up against the speakers. The muted signal can easily be seen on an oscilloscope. Redundant parallel mute states are needed to fully ground-out the signal and achieve a total mute.
Mechanical volume controls are supposed to place the input of the audio preamp at signal ground when the control is turned to minimum, but the potentiometers used aren’t perfect, and there could easily be a few ohms of input impedance at the input of the preamp even with the control set to zero volume level. This is enough to allow a tiny signal into the amplifier stages.
I guess the engineers figured that if you want zero volume, you’d turn the darned thing off 