I'm not sure if this is causing the problem, but normally audio CD's have much higher quality recordings on them...and when you download mp3's or rip them off your CD more often that not you will be sacrificing a lot of the audio quality in order to get them into the nice 5 mb size.
You can start downloading/ripping songs in CD quality, but it will just take up much more room on whatever device you are using to store the music. I think the goal of the lower quality was to strip off the frequencies that human ears cannot interpret while maintaining the frequencies we can hear...you can read more about it on the audio FAQ in this forum, or just google it.
This might not be the answer to your problem, but could be a contributing factor. I'd say try to rip the songs off of one of your CD's that plays "loud", and then burn the ripped songs onto another CD and then put that in your CD player. If the new CD sounds "quieter", then maybe thats the issue.
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