I have all the drivers loaded for the emu10k sound chip, at least all
the ones available through the Mediaubuntu and standard Ubuntu
repositories and still they seem to over drive my sound card and make
things shrill compared to the soundblaster drivers under Windoze.

This one is kind of critical, I turned down the levels in alsamixer and
still, I am driving real speakers, not computer stuff and they are too
expensive to burn out (Klipsch Cornwall's and Klipsch Heresy III's). I
have downloaded everything from the repositories and I am running the
alsa daemon, so I am puzzled.