To flesh out Didgeridoohan's response a bit...
There are two ways that Rockbox has 'tone controls';
One is to drive the capabilities of the codec devices in the various players - this is where you see the Bass and Treble options in menus - obviously Rockbox and only command the chip to do whatever it can do - if it only has Bass boost then obviously 0dB will be the minimum.
The other is the equalizer that is available on most players (all of them where the decoding is done in software I think) - this is done by running DSP code on the main processor, it is very versatile, I suggest that it needs a fair understanding of audio, and it does impact battery life becaus the CPU is working harder.