I converted a CD to WAV, but it doesn't sound the same. The bass is lousy. Is this a problem with the converter or does WAV do this?

there could be several things making the wav file sound bad. first i would look at the software. check to see if there are any "limits" on the rip/record or playback settings. it could be the cd. it's possible that when the cd was burned/pressed it was not normalized or set right to deliver full range audio. if it's a mp3 cd there could be issues in the files themselves.

If you have that funky little cable going from the back of your cd drive to your soundcard, then the sound data is being passed almost straight to your output (speakers/headphones). Whereas with a WAV file it goes through some software before it is passed out as audio. It you really wanted to test things, you could burn the WAV files back to a CD and see if it makes any difference to their sound. My guess is that the difference is because one is going straight to your output and the other is having some processing (just being played counts as processing in my books) first.

I'm pretty sure the CD is good quality, and the program seems to be OK. Perhaps it does have something to do with the hardware. In addition to having very little bass, I notice that the volume is much lower.

If it is going through some sort of pre-processing, am I just out of luck?

Ive run into the same problem before. Admitedly it was in windows, but I dont think its any different. Like Thymox was saying, the fact that wavs need to be processed through software to play is probably the culprit for the poor audio, though you might want to try to rip the CD with different software and see if your audio quality still dimishes.