how can I shrink the size of the sound preferences window?

[Skaperen]

I want to have a permanent window open with the audio level slider. The only one I can find is the "Sound Preferences" window, opened by clicking the speaker icon. The problem is, this window is too big, and attempts to shrink it do not work. It's like the developer had some overly inflated sense of self importance and disabled resizing below some awfully huge size. Is there a way to override this? Another app somewhere else that does only audio output level could work.