FooF

are you talking about the wave out option in windows volume control? if i max that out my sound crackles constantly... i keep it at halfway and the speakers still go louder than i want without any hissing.

it all depends on your soundcard. my vortex2 has a hardware equalizer. i dont think most cards have this though. i dont think you can get a hardware equalizer if you don't have one, short of buying a new sound card. on the software side of things, sblive cards have bass/treble controls in their software, and winamp has an equalizer built in (along with many other mp3 software programs).