By the way, it seems there is a little clipping near the high end. I'm not completely sure yet, but it sounds kind of like occasional clicks. Not sure how to fix that. It's my understanding I need to reduce volume levels to eliminate clipping. How do I reduce volume levels to my stereo with volume disabled? I analyzed the music but don't know what to do with the settings.
Sorry for the newbie questions.
The equalizer still works if volume is disabled. If you have volume disabled in MC and maximized in the windows mixer, you can't use any DSP/effects that boost levels without potentially causing clipping. The vast majority of tracks are mastered so that their peak is at or near digital fullscale, if you run your sound at fullscale and then add boost you will almost certainly get clipping.
So you have two options:
1) Only use equalizer/DSP that attenuate, rather than boost or
2) Set your volume lower (i.e. using internal volume).
JRiver's internal volume control is a high quality 64-bit digital volume control; the main advantage of disabling volume is that it potentially maximizes the SNR of your DAC, but that doesn't mean much if you can't do the equalization you need, or if you get clipping. The modern Burr Brown DACs have such high SNRs that "losing" five or ten dB of effective SNR due to a volume adjustment in JRiver is extremely unlikely to produce an audible effect.
You are theoretically losing some audio information when you digitally attenuate five or ten dB, but it would be information 80 or more dB below the peak, which is very unlikely to be audible in almost all listening settings. See this thread for more info about ways to potentially avoid that and/or why it may not be a real issue:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=84970.msg580851#msg580851
