Best equalizer settings for bass — with the numbers, and a way to hear them

Start with these five numbers: +8 dB at 60 Hz, −3 dB at 230 Hz, −2 dB at 910 Hz, +1 dB at 3 kHz, +3 dB at 14 kHz. That's a 5-band EQ set for deep bass that still sounds clean. If you want the stock version instead, the Bass Boost preset in the 5-band equalizer is +10, +5, −2, 0, +1 across the same bands. It hits harder and sounds thicker, and on a lot of headphones it also sounds muddier. The difference between those two settings is mostly one band: 230 Hz.

Most "best EQ settings for bass" advice tells you to push the lowest slider up and leave it there. That's half the job. The other half is getting the low mids out of the way so the low end has room to be heard.

The numbers, by situation

All values below are in dB, on five peaking filters centred at 60, 230, 910, 3000 and 14000 Hz with Q = 1.0. That's the layout the site's equalizer uses. Other 5-band EQs sit their bands at slightly different frequencies, so copy the shape rather than the exact numbers if you're typing these into a car head unit.

Load a track, type the numbers in, listen. Then read on for why each one sits where it does, because the point of learning how to set an equalizer for bass is that you stop needing anyone's preset.

Why cutting 230 Hz beats boosting 60 Hz

The 150–400 Hz range is where bass guitars, kick drum bodies, low piano notes, male vocals and the resonance of pretty much every room all pile up at once. When that region is loud, it masks the octave below it. Your ear hears "thick" instead of "deep". Pull 230 Hz down by 3 dB and the sub-bass that was already in the file becomes audible, without you adding a single dB to it.

This is why a −3 dB cut can beat a +6 dB boost for perceived depth. Boosting 60 Hz adds energy. Cutting 230 Hz reveals it. Do both and the bass gets deeper and tighter at once, and the track doesn't get much louder overall, which means it doesn't clip.

The 910 Hz band at −2 dB is doing a related job further up. Trimming the honky midrange slightly makes everything below it feel bigger by contrast. It's an old mixing trick: if you want more of something, take away what sits next to it.

What each of the five bands actually covers

With Q = 1.0, each filter spans roughly 1.4 octaves, so the bands overlap less than people assume. Here's the range each one really touches, between its half-gain points:

Two things follow. First, a lot of modern low end sits at 40–50 Hz, and the 60 Hz band only partly reaches it: set 60 Hz to +8 and you get about +4.7 dB at 40 Hz, not the full +8. Second, the +3 dB at 14 kHz in the recommended setting has nothing to do with bass. Heavy low-end boosting makes a track sound closed-in, and a little air at the top restores the balance without touching the low end at all.

Your playback hardware decides most of this

You can put +12 dB at 60 Hz into a phone's built-in speaker and hear almost nothing change, because the driver is a few millimetres across and its output falls off a cliff below roughly 500 Hz. No EQ setting fixes a speaker that can't move enough air. All the boost does is eat headroom and add distortion. That's why the phone-speaker row above leaves 60 Hz flat and puts a small lift at 230 Hz and 3 kHz instead. Honest, not satisfying.

The rest, roughly best to worst for bass:

• Car. Best case by far. Sealed cabin, door-mounted drivers with real cone area, and cabin gain that naturally lifts everything below about 60 Hz. A modest +6 dB goes a long way.
• Over-ear headphones. Good, but they vary enormously. Consumer models often ship with 6–10 dB of extra bass already baked in. Stacking another +10 dB on top is where "muddy" comes from. Start at +4 with 230 Hz at −4.
• In-ear buds. Entirely dependent on seal. A tip that doesn't seal loses most of the bass below 200 Hz, and no EQ recovers it. Swap tip sizes before you touch a slider. The best EQ settings for bass headphones are the ones you dial in after you've got a proper seal.
• Laptop speakers. Slightly better than a phone, still hopeless below about 200 Hz.

Bass boosts eat headroom fastest

Low frequencies carry more energy than anything else in a typical track, so a boost down there raises the waveform's peaks more than the same boost anywhere else. The maths is unforgiving: +6.02 dB doubles amplitude, +10 dB multiplies it by about 3.16, +12 dB by about 3.98. If a bass-heavy song already peaks at −1 dBFS and you add +10 dB at 60 Hz, the loud parts are asking for roughly +9 dBFS. There's nowhere to go.

A live clip warning names the percentage of the file running past full scale at your current setting. If that number is anything above zero, either drop the volume or back the 60 Hz band off by 2 dB. The soft limiter is on by default: a tanh knee, transparent below 0.7 of full scale and asymptotic above it, so it catches occasional peaks gracefully. It's a limiter, not a rescue service. Feed it 10 dB of overshoot on every kick and you'll hear the track squash.

Five-band EQ, or just a low shelf?

If all you want is "more bass" from one control, skip the EQ. The bass booster is a single low shelf at 120 Hz, adjustable from 0 to +12 dB, with presets at 0/25/50/75/100 %. A shelf lifts everything below its corner by the same amount — blunter, but very natural sounding. Light (about +3 dB) is enough for most already-bassy headphones. Max is +12 dB and needs the volume pulled down by a similar amount.

Use the 5-band EQ when the problem is shape rather than quantity: too much 230 Hz, not enough 60 Hz, a boxy 900 Hz. A shelf can't do that. It can only tilt.

Tune it by ear in five minutes

Presets are a starting point. Every track and every pair of headphones is different, and the fastest way to find your own settings is to change one thing at a time and compare honestly.

1. Play a track you know well, on the gear you'll actually use.
2. Set 60 Hz to +8 and leave everything else at 0. Listen for 20 seconds.
3. Move 230 Hz down in 1 dB steps. Somewhere between −2 and −5 the bass will start sounding deeper rather than just bigger. Stop there.
4. If cymbals now sound dull, add 2–3 dB at 14 kHz.
5. If vocals sound buried, add 1–2 dB at 3 kHz rather than pulling the bass back.
6. Check the clip readout and drop the volume slider until it reads zero clipped samples.

Step 2 is where most people fool themselves, because louder always sounds better for the first few seconds. The equalizer has a level-matched A/B button that switches between the processed and untouched signal with the processed side automatically trimmed to the original's peak, so you hear the tone change instead of a volume change. No competing browser EQ does this, and it will change some of your settings the first time you use it. Boosts you were sure about turn out to be adding level and nothing else.

When you're happy, export as WAV at 16, 24 or 32-bit float. It renders offline, faster than real time, entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, there's no sign-up, no watermark, and no MP3 export. If your source is a video, the video volume booster loads MP4, MOV and WebM, plays them with the boost applied, and exports the boosted audio as WAV — it does not re-encode the video file. And if you want the same five bands and the same genre presets on your phone, with per-track settings saved to a library, the Increase Volume app for iPhone carries the tuning over, though the limiter and the level-matched A/B live only on the web tools.

What EQ can't fix

A few things no setting on this page will do.

• It can't raise your phone or laptop's system volume. Nothing running in a browser can, and no iOS app can either — that ceiling belongs to the operating system. What these tools change is the audio itself, so a file that was too quiet stops being too quiet.
• It can't touch DRM-protected streaming audio. You need the actual file on your device.
• It can't remove noise or split a bass line out of a finished mix. A peaking filter at 60 Hz lifts everything at 60 Hz — kick drum, bass, air-conditioning rumble, all of it.

If your headphones are already at maximum and the low end still isn't there, EQ can carve space so you hear more of what's in the file. It can't make drivers produce bass they were never able to produce.