The HomePod is self-balancing, algorithmically adjusting its sound for the environment in which it’s placed.
Me? I like the sound. Have not yet felt the need to tweak it. But I do like a challenge. I came across this article from OSXDaily, which walks you through the process of tweaking your EQ for iOS.
I fired up some music, then went to Settings > Music and tapped EQ. There are 23 different canned EQ settings to choose from. The article recommends Late Night to maximize volume on your iPhone. Give that a try if you listen to music out of your iPhone speakers frequently.
Thought I’d try to AirPlay that EQ to HomePod.
With the music still playing, I went to Control Center, tapped the upper-right corner of the music player (bringing up AirPlay), and selected my HomePod. The music played, but when I tapped the various EQ settings, no change.
I went to iTunes on my Mac, launched System Preferences > Sound and tapped my HomePod. Back in iTunes, I tapped the EQ column in the current song (if you don’t see an EQ column, go to View > Show View Options and tap the Equalizer checkbox). No dice. Changing EQ does not impact HomePod.
This is me noodling, not at all a complaint. I love the HomePod sound. The EQ question comes up often enough, I thought I’d dig in, make sure I understood what was going on. Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.
So Apple has gone to some trouble to completely disable the ability to alter equalization.
1) They must be very confident that HomePod has absolutely optimal sound under every reasonable listening condition.
2) I wonder if there is an “accessibility” drawback, for people with compromised hearing; who might, for example, benefit from emphasizing middle frequencies.
I should probably be kept away from EQ settings. Give me a decent preset for the room I’m in and glue the sliders in place. 😉
I don’t really see any evidence that Apple went out of their way to disable the EQ. Given that controls are available on the iPhone but streaming is probably direct from Apple’s servers (why send all that data through the iPhone if you don’t have to) it’s probably just an unimplemented feature.
But though Airplay? Wouldn’t you expect the Pod to reproduce the stream verbatim including any EQ? Or does Airplay itself broadcast without EQ, in which case HomePod wouldn’t be implicated at all? (But then the original post seems slightly misleading).
I wonder if EQ and computational audio of the kind that the HP does are at odds? “Give me more midrange” vs “Let me account for the reflectivity of the hard walls” etc.
Huh. I don’t know if AirPlay on the AirPort Express respects the equalizer. And if it does, I don’t know if it does so by applying the effect on the Mac or the AirPort Express.
Great point!
I can’t remember where I saw it, but an interview with one of the Apple execs was quoted as saying it is adjusting the EQ in real-time on every song. Hence why you can’t change it.
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AirPlay does normally respect EQ (as I can attest from many years of “Why does this sound like crap? Oh yeah, MacBook speaker EQ is still on”), but the question of where the equalization is normally being applied is a good one.
I’d always kind of assumed it was done source-side since your music’s getting transcoded to ALAC anyway, but if the HomePod’s ignoring it, then it’s either being done target-side or the recent iOS and iTunes updates added an exception specifically for HomePod.