All Your Song Are Acoustic To Us
June 30, 2007
I discovered today that my music in iTunes sounds much better when I choose the "Acoustic" equalizer preset. This result is surprising, since most of my music is rock or pop.
I used to use the "Bass Booster" preset, because I like bass, and the small desktop speakers I used to have weren't as good as the ones I have now. I liked my music better with the bass boosted. But on my current computer speakers, boosting the bass makes the treble seem inadequate.
So for a while I used the "Rock" setting, which alleviates that problem. The sliders are positioned basically in a "V" shape, boosting both the bass and treble equally. Unfortunately, because it's a "V", the most extreme frequencies are the ones that are boosted the most, to the detriment of the midrange frequencies, especially the vocals.
The "Pop" setting is like an inverted "V", so you get the opposite problem. Vocals are more audible, but the music sounds like crap. Unless, presumably, it's a pop song with lots of midrange instruments.
For a while I just left the equalizer set to "Flat", figuring that since I couldn't find a setting that I was satisfied with, I should just trust the music professionals who mixed the albums to have done their jobs properly, and accept that what the music sounds like straight off the CD is what it was intended to sound like. But I still kept feeling that the "Flat" setting left the music sounding... flat.
So today I was fiddling with the equalizer yet again, and decided to just try all of the equalizer presets that iTunes provides, regardless of what genre or effect they were labeled as, to see which one sounds the best. And when I tried "Acoustic" (which is actually the first one since the list is alphabetic), I was blown away. It enhances the sound of the music, making it richer and deeper, without providing too much or too little amplification of any particular thing.
The improvement over all other settings that I've tried is like night and day. For the first time since I got my current computer speakers, music played via iTunes sounds excellent. It's like I got a whole new sound system.
I used to use the "Bass Booster" preset, because I like bass, and the small desktop speakers I used to have weren't as good as the ones I have now. I liked my music better with the bass boosted. But on my current computer speakers, boosting the bass makes the treble seem inadequate.
So for a while I used the "Rock" setting, which alleviates that problem. The sliders are positioned basically in a "V" shape, boosting both the bass and treble equally. Unfortunately, because it's a "V", the most extreme frequencies are the ones that are boosted the most, to the detriment of the midrange frequencies, especially the vocals.
The "Pop" setting is like an inverted "V", so you get the opposite problem. Vocals are more audible, but the music sounds like crap. Unless, presumably, it's a pop song with lots of midrange instruments.
For a while I just left the equalizer set to "Flat", figuring that since I couldn't find a setting that I was satisfied with, I should just trust the music professionals who mixed the albums to have done their jobs properly, and accept that what the music sounds like straight off the CD is what it was intended to sound like. But I still kept feeling that the "Flat" setting left the music sounding... flat.
So today I was fiddling with the equalizer yet again, and decided to just try all of the equalizer presets that iTunes provides, regardless of what genre or effect they were labeled as, to see which one sounds the best. And when I tried "Acoustic" (which is actually the first one since the list is alphabetic), I was blown away. It enhances the sound of the music, making it richer and deeper, without providing too much or too little amplification of any particular thing.
The improvement over all other settings that I've tried is like night and day. For the first time since I got my current computer speakers, music played via iTunes sounds excellent. It's like I got a whole new sound system.
Posted by Karl von Laudermann at 12:45 PM
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