Best equalizer settings for jazz and classical music

Short version: for jazz, set the five bands to −3 dB at 60 Hz, +2 at 230 Hz, +4 at 910 Hz, +2 at 3 kHz, −1 at 14 kHz. For classical, use 0, +2, +3, +3, +1. Both are built into the five-band equalizer as the Jazz and Classical presets, so you can load them in one click and nudge from there. The part that surprises people is that jazz cuts the bottom end, and on an acoustic recording that cut is the single move that does the most good.

The two presets in numbers

The equalizer uses five peaking filters at 60, 230, 910, 3000 and 14000 Hz, each with a Q of 1.0 and a range of ±12 dB. A Q of 1.0 puts each band roughly 1.4 octaves wide at its half-gain points, so the 60 Hz control really covers about 37 Hz to 97 Hz, and the 910 Hz control covers about 560 Hz to 1.5 kHz. Adjacent bands overlap, which means two boosts next to each other add up in the middle. Small moves go further than the numbers suggest.

Nothing here goes past +4 dB. Compare that with the Hip-Hop preset at +8 on 60 Hz and −4 on 910 Hz, or Bass Boost at +10. Those big curves suit music produced to be played loud on small speakers. Acoustic recordings were already balanced by an engineer on good monitors, and the harder you push, the more of that work you undo.

Why the jazz setting cuts 60 Hz

It feels backwards. Jazz is bass-forward music, so surely you want more low end? Usually not. The problem with jazz on most playback systems isn't a shortage of bass, it's that the bass is indistinct. You hear a warm hum where the notes should be and you can't follow the line.

An upright bass walking through a tune keeps its fundamentals somewhere between 41 Hz and about 200 Hz, but you don't identify the note from the fundamental. You identify it from the harmonics an octave or two up, plus finger noise and the thump of the string against the fingerboard. Cutting 3 dB at 60 Hz pulls down the region that masks all of that. The +2 at 230 Hz then puts the weight back one octave higher, where a laptop or phone speaker can actually reproduce it — those drivers put out nothing usable at 60 Hz anyway.

The bass ends up tighter and more defined, not thinner. If you flip between the two and it sounds thin rather than tight, your speakers are already bass-shy: set 60 Hz back to 0 dB, or leave it at −1. The preset is a starting point, not a verdict.

Same logic covers the kick drum and the left hand of a piano. Room modes and cheap speaker ports both pile energy up between 50 and 120 Hz. A modest cut there is often the most musical thing you can do.

What the 910 Hz boost does

The +4 dB at 910 Hz on jazz (+3 on classical) is the "bring the players into the room" control. Between roughly 560 Hz and 1.5 kHz sits the wood of a double bass, the body of a tenor sax, the reediness of a clarinet, the middle of a violin's range, the part of a piano note that tells you it's a piano and not a synth pad.

Most consumer presets scoop this range, because scooping mids makes music sound bigger on a quick listen. That's the classic smile curve: bass up, mids down, treble up. It works on drum machines. On a quartet recorded live in a room, a mid scoop pushes the musicians to the back wall and leaves you with boom and sizzle.

Boost too far and you'll hear honk, especially on brass. If a trumpet starts sounding like it's playing down a cardboard tube, pull 910 Hz back to +2 and add a dB at 3 kHz instead.

Jazz or classical: which one to pick

The two presets are close cousins, and the differences map onto how the music was recorded.

• Jazz (−3, +2, +4, +2, −1) assumes close microphones on a small group. Close mics bring proximity effect, which lifts the low end, so the 60 Hz cut compensates. They also catch a lot of high-frequency detail, hence the small −1 at 14 kHz to take the edge off cymbals and hiss on older recordings.
• Classical (0, +2, +3, +3, +1) assumes a stereo pair some distance from an orchestra in a hall. Distance eats high frequencies and the hall smooths the low end, so nothing needs cutting at the bottom and the top gets a gentle +1 of air back.

Use Classical for orchestral and chamber music, solo piano recitals, choral and organ recordings, and film scores played by a real orchestra. Use Jazz for small combos, vocal jazz, big band, and honestly for most acoustic singer-songwriter material and bluegrass too. It's a decent general acoustic setting, not a genre lock. If a solo classical guitar recording sounds tubby, borrow the jazz 60 Hz cut and keep the rest of Classical.

Why acoustic material wants small moves

A useful rule: on acoustic recordings, stay inside ±3 dB unless you're fixing something specific. There's a physical reason. Doubling amplitude is +6.02 dB, so ±3 dB is already about 1.41× in amplitude — double the power in that band. Across five overlapping filters, three or four modest boosts stack into something much bigger than any single number implies, and the phase shift from adjacent peaking filters starts smearing transients: the attack of a bow, the click of a bass string.

The other reason is that you're rarely correcting a bad recording. You're correcting your speakers and your room. A laptop speaker rolls off hard below about 200 Hz. Cheap earbuds often carry a lift somewhere around 3 to 5 kHz. Fix those with a couple of dB, then stop.

Use the level-matched compare, not your memory

Louder always sounds better for the first ten seconds. That's how people end up with a preset that's really just a volume increase wearing a costume. The tools here have a level-matched A/B button: one press flips between processed and untouched, and the processed side is trimmed back to the original's peak automatically. You hear the tone change with the loudness difference taken out.

Work like this. Load the preset, play a passage you know well — 20 seconds is plenty — and flip A/B a few times. If you can't reliably say which side you prefer, the setting isn't earning its place and you should reduce it. Then move one band and flip again. Two or three passes and you're done. Everything runs in your browser, no file is uploaded anywhere, and export is WAV at 16, 24 or 32-bit float rendered faster than real time. There's no MP3 option, so convert afterwards if you need one.

When EQ is the wrong tool

Plenty of "my classical recording is too quiet" problems aren't EQ problems. A well-recorded symphony has enormous dynamic range by design. A pianissimo string passage might sit 30 dB below the tutti climax, because that's what the composer wrote and the engineer captured it honestly. Turning up the treble won't fix that. It'll make the loud parts brighter and harsher while the quiet parts stay quiet.

Two honest options. Raise the overall level on the volume booster and let the soft limiter — a tanh-knee waveshaper that stays transparent below 0.7 of full scale and asymptotes to full scale above it — catch the peaks. That narrows the range so soft passages come up, which is the right move for a car or a train. Or accept the recording and turn the knob up in a quiet room.

A lot of classical listeners would tell you to do the second one and leave the EQ flat, and they have a point. Every filter you engage changes something a recording engineer already balanced. Flat is a legitimate answer. Worth knowing too: the booster measures sample peak, not true peak (dBTP), so an inter-sample peak can still nudge past full scale after conversion. Smart Boost's 1 dB of margin covers that in ordinary material.

What EQ genuinely cannot do: remove tape hiss without also removing cymbals, separate a soloist from an orchestra, or rescue a recording made on a phone in the fourth row. If the audience coughs are louder than the strings, no filter is going to save it. Nothing here changes your device's system volume either — a browser can't do that, and neither can any app.

The same settings on your phone

The Increase Volume app for iPhone and the Android version carry the same five bands at 60, 230, 910, 3000 and 14000 Hz with the same Jazz and Classical values, plus a bass control, volume to 200 %, WAV export, and a library that saves settings per track so an album keeps its curve. It works offline.

Two things the app doesn't have: the soft limiter and the level-matched A/B. So dial the curve in here in the browser, write down the five numbers, and type them into the app. If what you're after is warmth rather than a full curve, the low-shelf bass booster at 120 Hz is a gentler tool than pushing the 60 Hz band. A shelf lifts everything below its corner instead of putting a bump in one spot, and that suits orchestral music better than a peak does.