the cool edit experiment didn't have a large effect, but i did a second reinstall and played with some of the buffer settings in foobar and am getting closer to establishing a correct level of consistency. it's a time-based thing, so we'll have to see.

i've got the sequence lined up in cubase over asio to test it against. worst case scenario, i'll have to mix it from there. it's actually a relatively good strategy, because i can just fix the eq on a track by track basis, then import it into the original file.

this is annoying, but it's a necessity. slowly. surely.