Hmm, weird problem...I'm beginning to wonder whether that track is *supposed* to sound clipped, and it's only with your eq preset that the overall sound is clean enough to hear the harmonics that clipping creates!

The other distinct possibilty is that there is a bug in the player software that calculates the coeffiecients used in an eq section. If this is truly happening in the DSP and only when your cut-only eq is present, then this has to be the prime suspect. (Given that you've already eliminated my bass/treble hack as a cause - thanks) And remember that there was a bug fix in beta12 to fix the channel lock issue - if I was working for SB doing SQA on beta12, the first thing I'd do here would be to try to reproduce it on beta11...But there is the possibility that if it is a bug in the player, then it has existed forever - the SAA7705 programming manual does not appear to give us the format of the bytes for the eq sections, but refers us to EQU, a program used to calculate them. I'm guessing that this EQU program wasn't distributed as an ARM binary, and that the code that the player uses was specifically coded for the Empeg.