How to Access the iPhone Equalizer

The iPhone default audio settings are a little flat for some types of music, and if you’re not thrilled with the way it sounds you will find it remarkably easy to adjust thanks to the iPhone’s built-in equalizer option.

Technically the iPhone equalizer is part of the Music app, it’s not an equalizer in the sense of manual sliders that you can adjust on your own, but there are tons of preset options for a wide variety of music or audio needs, and you’ll certainly find one for your audio preferences, whether you’re listening to ebooks, rock, classical, electronic, podcasts, or anything in between.

How to Access & Adjust the iPhone Equalizer

Here is how and where to modify the iPhone equalizer settings so that you can set them to how you’d like audio and music to sound:

1. Open the ‘Settings’ app (usually located on your Home screen, unless you moved it)
2. Scroll down to and tap on “Music” (or ‘iPod’ on older iOS versions)
3. Now tap on ‘EQ’



4. Scroll through the list to find the settings right for you
5. Select the preset equalizer settings you want to use by tapping on them
6. Exit the EQ settings by clicking the home button or by manually navigating out of the Settings

Note: I highly recommend having a song playing while you are trying out different EQ settings, the changes are quite different and you will immediately hear how each sounds as it impacts treble levels, bass, amplification, and all the equalizer magic.

You may want to change your iPhone’s equalizer settings to fit different audio output, for instance I use ‘Small Speakers’ when I’m using Apple’s earbuds, but I’ll use a more specific genre theme with higher quality headphones, external speakers, or my iPhone/iPod dock. It makes a surprisingly big difference, so play around and find one that works for you.

This same protocol works for adjusting the equalizer on every other Apple portable iOS based product, from the iPhone, to the iPod and iPad. Note that the appearance of EQ settings may be slightly different depending on the version of iOS in use on the device, for example here’s how it looks in much older system software releases:

The equalizer settings still exist, and still work the same, regardless of appearance however.

On the desktop side of things, iTunes has a much more complete equalizer with fine-tune controls in addition to the standard default preset options for music genres and audio types, and that is accessible from both Windows and Mac OS X versions.