XP Upgrade sound problem

I upgraded to XP and things went fairly good. Did some adjustments etc. Then I noticed that my sound comes through my speakers with a kind of muffled bass distortion. When I went to do the advanced bass/treble adjustment it could nto be activated. HELP told me that with the current sound driver I could not access the bass/treble setting. Does this mean I need some kind of upgrade on the sond driver? The speakers are very good Altecs so that is not the problem. Even the small higher range speakers seem to have a heavy bass distortion. Any ideas to help? Dennis

 

What kind of sound card do you have ? system etc .....

 

I have a Compaq Presario that I bought in 1999. It has a 399Mhz Intel Pentium cpu with 384 RAM upgraded memory. Under Device Manager it says ESS MAESRO 2 PCI AutoDrive (WDM) and LEGACY Audio Drivers.

A tech guy I spoke with suggeted that XP may of installed a sound driver that it prefers and eliminated the original. I do not know what the origianal was except I think it may of been the Maestro. He said to use the Quick Restore and set up the original cosund driver. I tried this but the Quick Restore would not run on XP.
The main problem is a heavily boosted bass with no way to reduce it in the sound settings. Any thoughts? Sorry for the slow response but I was working.

Thanks Dennis