I wouldnt turn loud on..
Loud and bas bost and sh!t like that are pure crap.. Would never use them.. But i just made an example..
@Plutoman--man u lost me miles away =) Check out my location lol ^^ i learned my english whilst watching Simpsons,so please easy with the technical terms,and use more laic word.. Maybe trow an example somewhere =)
Alright //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif
Throw in an example with a subwoofer.
You know how it'll peak at a certain frequency? Especially with ported boxes, there's a note that it's loudest on. Based on the characteristics of the sub.
Basically, all speakers do that. And a subwoofer only does it at one note, other speakers, since they play way more notes, they do it at several spots, where it's louder than the rest.
The objective of equalizing is to narrow those down. As in, find the spots it's loudest at, and on the equalizer, turn that down. A lot of people turn up lower spots - what you actually should do is turn down louder spots in the response curve (basically, a graph of where the speakers are loudest at). Otherwise, it does the same thing a bass boost does, and can clip the signal to the speakers.
Now, since you are only turning down parts of it, wherever the max is set at, it won't make a difference. You are right in a few ways - if you are using the equalizer and turning it up at spots to make it louder, then if you have the gains set already, it'll screw with that, because it'll be louder than it should go. But, if you have the gains set, and you only cut back the signal in spots, you won't go over the maximum amp or speaker capabilities.
Hopefully that helps a bit.
The theory makes sense - but in reality, it's based on using the equalizers improperly, which is an extremely common mistake.