After reading a little, I installed the ALSA output driver for XMMS, choose it in Preferences, but it's made no difference. Why can't I tweak my bass and trebles???

Try running kmix and see if you can affect the base and treble from there.

If you can, then XMMS should also be able to.

Some sound cards drivers do not fully support this on integrated audio chipsets.

KMix works for volume, but the tone slider (I assume it's the LFE one) doesn't do anything.

Low Frequency Sound Enhancement is only supported on a few cards.

What sound card do you have?

It's built into my Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo.

Yup with some of the integrated (read REALLY brain dead) audio chipsets (with only a few exceptions) the Linux drivers do not handle changing Treble and Bass.

In Winblows this is handled in software as the DSP funtions are emulated.

That is, there is no actual hardware on the Motherboard which Linux can adjust.

Bummer But why can't Linux do it the same way as Windoze?

cos theres no standard software sound daemon and not all apps use a daemon.

why cant u use the xmms equaliser and import winamp presets and use them for ur trebel and bass stuff ?

cos I don't even know what that means...I'll do some reading and see if I can figure out how to do that. Thanks.

Ok, I haven't been able to get that to work :s I found some presets online, but I can't get XMMS to recognize them. Very frustrating...

This is basically a limitation of your motherboard.

On board audio on MOST motherboards is akin to utilizing a Winmodem.

Your computer lacks the actual hardware that would normally do these functions.

Instead there are drivers being used in Windows that perform the same functions in hardware.

This is a cost cutting mechanism for the manufacturer.

You want a modem, you got one. However it's not "really" a modem it's a piece of software that emulates one. Same thing with audio.

Since these same manufacturers do not want to open up their low level stuff to the open source community, Linux doesn't support software emulated hardware very well (AS IT SHOULDn't!).

Frankly the consumer should be screaming and railing AGAINST this type of thing...

To make matters worst, this software uses up CPU cycles and system resources (which is why gamers have so many problems with this stuff).

This type of configuration is not problematic on an office computer where-in the user does not care about audio, modems or even great graphics.

On a home system, it's a different beast altogether. However since this is so inexpensive to do, it permits a manufacturer to offer cheap systems to a cost concience buyer.

Most Winblows home users are none the wiser until Junior starts trying to play Doom 3 and discovers that it will not run on the new home machine.

Anyway, get yourself a sound card. You can pick up SBLive cards for a song, which are fully supported in Linux.

Will do...thanks for the explanation.