If it can help make the sound more tolerable, why not?

I get some headache inducing mids/highs from my N800, encoding doesn't make any difference with that, but the eq sure does.

Ideally I'd be playing nothing but flac (with eq), but storage isn't quite cheap enough for that yet.

I wish the N800 sounded as good to my ears as my HiMD unit, but I didn't expect it to, in fact I expected it to sound much worse than it does.