Volume pot question re: unity gain in distortion box

[ultar]

this may be slightly off topic as it pertains to modifying rather than building an effect, but i'm sure someone around here could help.

i recently bought a distorion pedal which sounds pretty awesome, but has a problem with volume. while every other pedal i have reaches unity gain with the knob somewhere around 12, this pedal still does not reach unity gain with the volume turned completely up. it still sounds good when on but going from clean to distorted is bad because of the volume drop.

could it be that the company used a smallish value volume pot (maybe to reduce noise) that prevents the distortion from reaching/surpassing the bypass volume? if so i'm thinking that the solution might be to install a higher value pot, but as it looks like the pot is soldered into the pcb i'd like to find out if this solution would even work before i go disassembling and desoldering everything.

any other possible theories for the volume drop are welcome.