5-band equalizer settings chart (60 / 230 / 910 / 3000 / 14000 Hz)

Here are the numbers. Ten presets, five bands, exact dB values at 60 Hz, 230 Hz, 910 Hz, 3 kHz and 14 kHz. These are the settings in the five-band equalizer on this site, and they transfer to just about any other five-band EQ with band centres in the same neighbourhood.

Every band runs from -12 to +12 dB, and all ten presets sit inside that. Each filter is a peaking biquad at Q = 1.0, and that Q value matters as much as the dB numbers do. The Increase Volume app uses the same five band centres and the same six genre preset values, so a curve you like on one works on the other.

What each band actually does

Five sliders isn't many, so each one covers a lot of ground. Here's what you're grabbing.

What each preset is doing

Read down the rows and the logic shows up fast.

• Rock is a mild smile: both ends up, a small -2 dip in the middle. The 8 dB gap between 60 Hz and 910 Hz is what makes guitars sound big without turning to mush.
• Jazz is the only preset that leans on the midrange and trims both extremes. Upright bass gets tidier at -3, and the +4 at 910 Hz puts the players in the room with you.
• Hip-Hop has the widest spread of any preset here: +8 at 60 Hz against -4 at 910 Hz is a 12 dB tilt. That's four times the amplitude difference between the sub and the mids.
• Classical is the gentlest, nothing past +3. Well-recorded orchestral material rarely needs more.
• Electronic lifts both ends hard (+7 and +7) and leaves 910 Hz alone at 0, which keeps synth leads from going nasal.
• Voice cuts both low bands and adds +5 at 3 kHz. It makes a file quieter overall while making speech easier to follow, which is what you want on a podcast or a lecture recording.
• Movie keeps the +4 at 3 kHz for dialogue but adds +4 at 60 Hz so explosions still land.
• Bass Boost stacks +10 and +5 on the two lowest bands. An effect, not a correction.
• Treble tilts the file upward, +8 at the top. On lossy files it does less than you'd expect, for the low-pass reason above.

Why these five frequencies

60, 230, 910, 3000 and 14000 Hz aren't arbitrary. They're spaced roughly two octaves apart: 60 to 230 is 1.94 octaves, 230 to 910 is 1.98, 910 to 3000 is 1.72, and 3000 to 14000 is 2.22. Five points at that spacing cover the audible band with no big holes.

The layout comes from consumer hi-fi and got copied into car head units, phone EQs and media players. Android's built-in five-band equalizer uses 60, 230, 910, 3600 and 14000 Hz. Car stereos label theirs Bass / Low-Mid / Mid / High-Mid / Treble and land within a few hundred Hz of the same points. A chart written for these five frequencies travels in a way a 10- or 31-band chart doesn't.

Now the Q part. At Q = 1.0 a peaking filter is about 1.39 octaves wide between its half-gain points, and the bands sit around two octaves apart, so the skirts overlap. Set +6 at both 60 Hz and 230 Hz and the region between them rises too, but not by the full amount: at 120 Hz you get roughly +4 dB, because each filter is already partway down by the time it reaches there. Gains add in dB, so overlapping boosts stack, always to less than the sum of the two settings. That's why Bass Boost's +10 plus +5 sounds bigger than a lone +10 would. The lift is wider, not just taller.

Rules that matter more than the numbers

Copy the chart, but keep four things in mind and you'll beat the presets within a minute of fiddling.

• Cut before you boost. If the vocal is buried, cutting 230 Hz by 3 dB usually beats boosting 3 kHz by 3 dB, and it costs no headroom. Boosting adds level. Cutting makes room.
• 3 dB is clearly audible. That's about a 1.41x change in amplitude on that band. You don't need 10 dB to hear a difference. Most good settings are small.
• 12 dB is a special effect. +12.04 dB is exactly four times the amplitude. Almost nothing in a normal recording is 12 dB wrong.
• One slider at a time, then listen for 15 seconds. Your ears adapt fast, which is why five minutes of tweaking always ends with everything boosted.

Copying these into another player

The values transfer directly. Two adjustments to make.

Band centres won't match exactly. If your player's third band sits at 1 kHz instead of 910 Hz, or the fourth at 3.6 kHz instead of 3 kHz, use the nearest one. At Q = 1 the filter is well over an octave wide, so a 20 % shift in centre frequency changes almost nothing you can hear.

Different band counts need mapping. On a 10-band EQ, split each value across the two nearest sliders instead of putting the full amount on both: +8 at 60 Hz and +8 at 125 Hz adds up to considerably more than +8 across that region. On a three-band bass/mid/treble control, use the 60 Hz, 910 Hz and 14 kHz columns and ignore the rest.

To hear what a preset is really doing, the equalizer page has a level-matched A/B button. It flips between processed and untouched audio with the processed side trimmed back to the original's peak, so you hear the tone change instead of just "louder". Nearly every EQ demo you've compared was unmatched, which is why the boosted version always won.

What EQ can't fix

A preset changes tone. It doesn't make the file meaningfully louder overall, and it can't add information that was never recorded.

If the whole file is just quiet, no EQ curve solves it. Use the volume booster instead. It scans every sample and reports peak in dBFS, RMS, integrated loudness in LUFS and available headroom, then names the exact percentage that gets you as loud as possible with zero clipped samples. It measures sample peak, not true peak (dBTP), so leave a little extra margin if the file is heading for a lossy encoder.

If you want more low end and don't care about the other four bands, a low shelf at 120 Hz is a cleaner tool than a 60 Hz peak. A shelf lifts everything below the corner by the same amount, up to +12 dB, instead of putting a bump at one spot and leaving the octave below it behind. For quiet dialogue in a video, the video volume tool plays the file with the audio boosted and exports that boosted audio as a WAV. It does not re-encode the video, so what you get back is an audio file, not a new MP4.

EQ also won't remove background noise, separate vocals from a backing track, or repair a recording that was already clipped. Cutting 230 Hz can make a hissy file less annoying to sit through. The hiss is still there.

And none of this raises your phone's or laptop's system volume. No web page can do that, and no app can either. What changes is the level inside the file, which is why you export the boosted copy and play that back.

Building your own settings

Start from Normal, not from a preset. Then work in this order.

1. Fix the problem first. Muddy? Take 230 Hz down 3 dB. Harsh? Take 3 kHz down 3 dB. Boxy or nasal? 910 Hz down 3 dB.
2. Then add what's missing. One band, 2 to 4 dB, no more.
3. Check it against flat, level-matched. If the difference is small at matched level, keep the smaller setting.
4. Check it on the device you'll actually use. A +8 at 60 Hz that sounds huge on headphones does nothing at all on a laptop speaker, and it's spending 8 dB of headroom to do nothing.

Settings that work tend to look boring written down. A couple of small cuts, one modest boost, nothing at the rails. Jazz is a good template for that shape. Bass Boost is the opposite, and it's there because sometimes you want the effect rather than the accuracy. For the same bands and preset values on your phone, with settings saved per track and no connection needed, there's the Increase Volume app for iPhone and the Android version. The limiter and the level-matched A/B are website-only for now.