5-band equalizer online — 60 / 230 / 910 / 3000 / 14000 Hz

What each of the five bands does

These are the same five frequencies the app uses, chosen because they land on the parts of the spectrum people actually complain about.

The presets, and what they are for

Every preset here is a real set of numbers, not a mood. The six from the app are reproduced exactly, so a Rock curve on the website is the Rock curve on your phone.

• Rock — +6 at 60 Hz, +3 at 230, −2 at 910, +4 at 3 k, +5 at 14 k. A smile curve: weight and bite, with the midrange pulled back slightly.
• Hip-Hop — +8 at 60 Hz with a −4 dB scoop at 910. Heavy low end, room made for it in the mids.
• Jazz — −3 at 60 Hz, +4 at 910. Tightens the bass and brings instruments forward; good for anything acoustic.
• Classical — gentle lifts through the mids and highs, bass left alone. Detail without hype.
• Electronic — +7 at 60 Hz and +7 at 14 kHz. The classic loud-and-bright shape.
• Voice — cuts the bottom, lifts 3 kHz. The single most useful setting for podcasts, lectures, interviews and voice memos.
• Movie — a little more weight and a lot more 3 kHz, for dialogue you keep missing.
• Bass Boost and Treble — the two extremes, for when you know exactly which end you want.

Cut first, boost second

The instinct is always to boost the thing you want more of. Try the opposite: if the vocal is buried, cutting 230 Hz brings it forward more convincingly than boosting 3 kHz, and it costs you no headroom instead of eating it. Boosting adds level and pushes you toward clipping; cutting frees level up. A curve made mostly of small cuts almost always sounds more natural than the same shape made of big boosts.

Small moves, too. ±3 dB is a clearly audible change. ±6 dB is a big one. ±12 dB, the end of the slider, is a special effect. If you find yourself at the end of the slider on three bands at once, the problem is probably the source file rather than the equalizer.

Reading the response curve

The curve under the sliders is not decoration — it is computed from the same filter maths the browser uses to process your audio, so it is a real picture of what is happening. The dashed line is 0 dB, unchanged. Because each band is a peaking filter with a Q of 1.0, it affects roughly an octave either side of its centre, and the skirts of neighbouring bands overlap. The result is less intuitive than it sounds: push 60 Hz and 230 Hz up by 6 dB each and you get about +4 dB at 120 Hz, between them — less than either slider, because both filters are already well down by the time they reach the midpoint. Meanwhile each band's own centre gets a little help from its neighbour, landing near +6.5 dB rather than exactly +6. The curve shows you both effects; the slider positions alone would not.

What an equalizer cannot fix

It moves frequencies that are already in the file. It cannot recover treble that was thrown away by a heavily compressed MP3, cannot remove a voice from a song, and cannot separate two sounds occupying the same frequency range. If a recording is clipped and distorted, boosting is not the cure — the flattened peaks are already baked in. And if the whole thing is simply too quiet, the volume booster is the tool you want, not this one.