For regular listening I encode my CD collection in WMA lossless. It might not be perfectly transparant to the origenal disk, but its really close.

In Media player things usually sound ok. For fun I slammed the 31 hz bar in Media player to test a pair of monitors I built, and then left it on by mistake (phone rang), and left the studio for a week.

When i came back, everything sounded distorted. bad modulation without actually reproducing low end (my system is flat down to like 18 hz. ). Clearly the windows eq caused it. obviously, I turned it off, but... now I feel like windows or media player has poor headroom. My stereo converters are Lynx II.

Is there a better quality audio system for playing back wma files or am I stuck with a low headroom junkpile called windows? Or was it just the eq itself heaping node-chaos upon phase disaster?