Sony WH-1000MX3 Equalization Settings

Well, now that the house is really getting dialed, in here are some final notes, there will be a blizzard, but got to start somewhere.

The Sony WH-1000MX series are designed be to very base heavy. When you have great earphones like the Etymotic ER-4a or the Sennheiser HD-650, this can be kind of annoying. The fix is to have an equalizer to adjust the sound properly. Fortunately, a Reddit user /u/BrightPlace did the work to figure out the response curves and therefore what is needed to bring it to true.

Different folks vary, but it look like the errors are:

SourceClear Bass400Hz1K2.5K6.3K16K
Les Numeriques+10+1 0-1-3-10
Rtings+50-2-2-4-10
Super Best Audio+80-2-5-5-10
/u/BrightPlace+50-2-1-4-10
Estimated error from flat for the WH MX1000

There are a few ways that you can implement this. If you use the Sony application, then you can just set it in as above. This works great if the input source is an IOS Device, then you just follow the settings on imgur.

Set on Sony App on mobile device

To reverse these effects that is to set the Sony application to Manual and then:

  1. Set Clear Base to -5
  2. 400Hz as 0
  3. 1Khz as +2
  4. 2.5Khz at +1
  5. 6.3Khz at +4
  6. 16Khz at +10

On your Mac

The Mac doesn’t have a Sony application, so instead, you need to use one of three ways to provide equalization as MakeTechEasier says:

  1. If you just want it for your music, then you can use the dedicate Equaliser in Apple Music at Window/Equalizer where you can make a preset, it’s a little hard to figure out what the values are since it is not clear what Clear Bass means, and the points are different, but I used -5/32Hz, -4/64Hz, -2/125Hz, -1/250Hz, 1/500Hz, 2/1Khz, 3/4Khz, 6/8Khz, 12/16KHz
  2. If you want this to work for Zoom and other system oriented things, then you need to use a their party utility like Boom (just $10 for Black Friday). As a bonus, it also does 3D surround sound.
  3. Airfoil is a utility that I often use, while Apple Music let’s you transmit it’s playback to a whole bunch of different sources, you can’t do this for the system, Airfoil make the Mac a full client that let’s you connect the output to just about anything. Pretty useful for parties and things. It does cost $30 for the privilege so beware of that.

I’m Rich & Co.

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