How to use an equalizer on a Mac (system-wide, Spotify, Apple Music)

macOS has no system-wide equalizer. Apple Music and Spotify each have their own EQ, but it only affects that app, and both are fixed-frequency sliders rather than a parametric EQ. To EQ everything, or to use a parametric EQ, the audio has to pass through a separate app, usually by way of a virtual audio device, and from that point the stream reaching your DAC is no longer bit-perfect.

That last part is not a reason to avoid EQ. Any EQ changes the samples; that is what it is for. What matters is where the change happens, whether you chose it, and whether anything else touched the audio before it got there. This article covers the three places you can EQ on a Mac, what each one costs, and how to set a parametric EQ so that it actually helps.

Does macOS have a built-in equalizer?

No. There is no equalizer in System Settings, and Audio MIDI Setup sets each device's format and sample rate but has no EQ. Nothing in macOS applies a tone curve to every app's output.

What you do get are equalizers inside individual apps. They work, but each one stops at the edge of its own app: the Apple Music EQ does nothing to Spotify, YouTube in a browser or a game, and the reverse is also true.

The Apple Music equalizer on Mac

Apple Music on the Mac has an equalizer under Window > Equalizer. Apple describes it as a set of frequency sliders you drag up or down to raise or lower each band in decibels, with more than 20 presets for common settings. You can save your own with Make Preset, and assign a preset to a single song under Get Info > Options so it applies whenever that song plays. Separately, Music > Settings > Playback has a Sound Enhancer control.

Its limits:

• It only affects the Music app. Nothing else on the Mac goes through it.
• It is a graphic EQ. The band frequencies are fixed. You choose how much to boost or cut at each slider, but not where the band sits or how wide it is.
• Apple Music has no output device setting of its own. It plays to whatever the Mac's output is. That matters later, when you want to route it through something else.

Does Spotify have an equalizer on Mac?

Yes. Spotify's own help page lists the equalizer for desktop as well as iOS and Android. On a Mac, click your profile picture, choose Settings, and under Playback turn Equalizer on, then pick a preset or drag the points. It cannot be changed while you are playing to another device over Spotify Connect.

Like Apple Music's, it affects only Spotify and works on fixed bands.

There is a less visible point worth knowing about Spotify on the Mac, because it bears on "bit perfect mac" as a goal. We measured what Spotify actually sends, with lossless quality selected, volume normalization off and the app's volume at 100. Audio that leaves a player untouched lands exactly on the grid of values of its source: a 16-bit file lands on the 16-bit grid. Spotify's output landed on that grid 0.03% of the time (0.01% on a second measurement), and a constant change in volume could not explain it. The device was running at 44.1 kHz, so macOS was not converting the rate on the way. Something inside Spotify's own path was processing the audio in floating point. The measurement cannot tell whether that is Spotify's playback processing or a track that was not actually delivered lossless, but either way the stream was not the file.

For comparison, Qobuz playing to the same kind of virtual device, chosen inside the Qobuz app, landed on the 16-bit grid 100.00% of the time for CD-quality tracks and on the 24-bit grid 100.00% for 24-bit/96 kHz tracks, with no change in gain. Qobuz also switched the device's sample rate between 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz to follow the track. Spotify did not: the device stayed at 96 kHz while Spotify played a 44.1 kHz lossless track, so a rate conversion had to happen somewhere.

The practical reading: if you EQ Spotify, you are adding your change to a stream that was already changed. That is fine for listening. It just means "the file, then only my EQ" is not on offer from Spotify on a Mac today.

How system-wide EQ works on a Mac

Since macOS will not EQ every app for you, a system-wide equalizer app has to get hold of the audio after the apps have produced it, process it, and send the result to your real output. The common way is a virtual audio device: a device that appears in the Sound settings like any other output, but is really a hand-off point. Apps play into it, the EQ app reads from it, applies its processing and plays the result to your speakers, headphones or DAC.

Several Mac apps work along these lines, and they differ in what they offer. Going by their own product pages:

• eqMac describes itself as system audio processing for macOS. Its free tiers have a bass/mid/treble EQ and a 10-band EQ; the paid tier adds an equalizer with unlimited bands, each with gain, bandwidth, frequency and a choice of filter types, plus a per-app volume mixer.
• SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba has a built-in 10-band equalizer and Audio Unit plugin support, both for the whole system and for individual apps.

Whichever you use, the approach carries two costs.

Cost 1: it applies to everything you route through it

If the Mac's output is set to the virtual device, every sound on the Mac goes through the EQ: music, YouTube, video calls, notification sounds. An EQ designed for your speakers in your room is usually a reasonable thing to apply to all of it. An EQ that tames a particular recording, or a heavy bass lift for a pair of headphones, may not be.

Some tools get around this by working per app, which is what SoundSource's per-app EQ is for. The other way around it is to send only the music app to the EQ, which works when the music app lets you choose its own output device. More on that below.

Cost 2: what reaches the DAC is no longer bit-perfect

"Bit perfect" means the DAC receives exactly the samples in the file. Turning on any EQ ends that, by design: a filter changes the samples. So the useful question is not "is it bit-perfect" but "is anything changing the audio that I did not choose".

There are two separate places where unwanted changes creep in:

1. Before the EQ. The player or macOS can change the audio on its way to the virtual device. Our measurements found three different causes. Spotify's own processing, as above. A rate mismatch: if the virtual device runs at 48 kHz and the track is 44.1 kHz, macOS converts the rate inside the sending app before the audio ever reaches the device, and nothing downstream can undo that. And browsers: Google Chrome playing a 48 kHz file into the same device, at the same rate, with no volume change, came out with a residual of -43.3 dB against the original, where macOS's own command-line player was bit-identical. Chrome has some light filtering in its path.
2. At the EQ. Boosting a band needs headroom. If nothing lowers the level to make room, peaks clip.

Whether a player arrives untouched mostly comes down to one thing: does the app let you choose its output device itself? An app with its own output setting, such as Qobuz or TIDAL, opens the device directly and sets the device's sample rate to match the track. Apple Music and Spotify have no such setting and play to the Mac's default output, and in our tests neither arrived untouched.

Graphic EQ vs parametric EQ

The EQs in Apple Music and Spotify, and the 10-band EQs in most system-wide apps, are graphic EQs: a row of sliders at fixed frequencies, each with a fixed width. You only choose the gain.

A parametric EQ (PEQ) gives each band three controls:

Control	What it sets
Frequency	Where the band is centred
Gain	How much it boosts or cuts, in dB
Q	How wide it is. Higher Q is narrower

It also usually gives a choice of filter shape for each band: a bell (peaking filter) that lifts or cuts around a centre frequency, a low shelf or high shelf that lifts or cuts everything below or above a point, and high-pass and low-pass filters that remove what is below or above a point.

The difference matters when the problem is narrow. A room mode or a headphone resonance might be a peak a few hertz wide at, say, 47 Hz. A graphic EQ can only pull down its nearest fixed band, which is wider and centred somewhere else, so it takes out a lot of what was fine along with the peak. A parametric EQ can put a narrow cut exactly on it. That is also why room and headphone correction curves are usually given as PEQ settings: a frequency, a gain and a Q per band.

How to set a parametric EQ

A few principles do most of the work.

Fix one thing at a time, and know what it is. "More bass" is a preference; "a peak at 47 Hz from the room" is a problem. EQ is good at problems you can name, best of all ones you have measured. Measure, or start from a published correction for your headphones, rather than sweeping knobs until something sounds different.

Cut more than you boost. A narrow peak is usually best handled with a narrow cut. Dips are often a different story: in a room, a deep dip at the listening position is often a cancellation, and boosting into it mostly spends amplifier power and headroom without filling it.

Use wide, gentle filters for tone and narrow ones for resonances. A broad tilt toward warmer or brighter is a shelf or a low-Q bell of a few dB. A high Q belongs on a specific, identified peak.

Leave headroom for every boost. If the largest boost in the curve is +6 dB, a full-scale track will try to go 6 dB over full scale at that frequency. Lower the overall level by at least as much as your peak boost, either with the EQ's preamp or a gain stage. Note that where boosts overlap, they add: two neighbouring +4 dB bells can make more than +4 dB between them, so judge from the combined curve, not from each band on its own.

Comparing EQ settings: match the loudness first

This is the part most people skip, and it decides whether your comparisons mean anything.

When two versions of the same music differ in level, most listeners prefer the louder one, often hearing it as clearer, fuller or more detailed. An EQ almost always changes the overall level: a bass boost makes the track louder, a cut makes it quieter. So if you flip between "EQ on" and "EQ off" without correcting the level, you are largely comparing loudness, and a boost will tend to win.

Two more things make a comparison more trustworthy:

• Switch instantly. If changing from one version to the other takes several seconds, you end up comparing what you hear with what you remember.
• Compare against a reference. Switching between your EQ and no EQ at matched level tells you what the EQ does, not just which of two versions you like.

What Sonir Bench does here

Sonir Bench (0.1.62, Apple Silicon) installs its own virtual audio device, and works best when only the music goes into it. In an app that lets you choose its output device, such as TIDAL, Qobuz, Roon or Audirvana, you choose Sonir Bench there and leave the Mac's own output alone, so the EQ applies to the music and not to YouTube or notifications. Spotify and Apple Music have no output setting, so for them the Mac's output has to be set to Sonir Bench, and everything on the Mac then goes through it. The Monitor screen watches the incoming audio continuously and shows whether it is arriving untouched and at which bit depth, so you can see whether the player changed anything before your EQ did. (Setup guide)

The EQ itself is built in Graph from biquad filters with eight shapes, including bell, low and high shelf, high-pass and low-pass, each with frequency, Q and, for bell and shelves, gain. The bands are drawn as one combined response curve, solved by the same code that runs the filter, along with the combined peak gain so you can see the headroom it uses. Processing runs at 705.6 kHz or 768 kHz internally in 64-bit floating point. On A/B you put two designs, or a design and nothing, into two slots and switch with the A, B and Space keys without a gap. Match loudness (recommended) is on by default and corrects each slot's level from its filter coefficients, so you hear the difference in tone rather than in level. (Compare guide)

FAQ

Is there a system-wide equalizer built into macOS?

No. macOS has no equalizer that applies to every app. Apple Music and Spotify have their own, which only affect themselves. For everything else you need a separate EQ app.

Does the Spotify equalizer work on Mac?

Yes. In the desktop app, open Settings from your profile picture and turn on Equalizer under Playback. It only affects Spotify, and it cannot be changed while you play to another device over Spotify Connect.

Can I use EQ and still have bit-perfect playback on a Mac?

Not in the strict sense: any EQ changes the samples, so the DAC no longer receives the file as it is. What you can keep is an untouched input, so that the only change is the one you chose. That depends on the player: apps that let you choose their output device, such as Qobuz and TIDAL, can deliver the file untouched; Spotify and Apple Music did not in our tests.

Should I use a graphic or a parametric EQ?

A graphic EQ is fine for broad tone changes. For a specific problem, such as a room mode or a headphone resonance, a parametric EQ lets you put a filter of the right width exactly where the problem is, which is why measured corrections are usually given as PEQ settings.

Why does the EQ'd version always sound better?

Often because it is louder. Most EQ settings change the overall level, and listeners tend to prefer the louder of two versions. Compare at matched loudness, and switch instantly, before deciding.