Well gee! The blog didn’t quite turn out as I had intended.
Nevertheless, here are some tips on getting good sound quality from iTunes.
All of my results were obtained using an early 2007 MacBook (black), with the headphone jack feeding a set of Creative SBS 580 speakers. I am only using the main left and right speakers, as well as the subwoofer. This is because the headphone jack of the MacBook only produces a stereo signal, if you are using a standard 3.5mm jack connection. I believe that the same socket also provides an Dolby 5.1 optical output but, since I have never found the connecter to take advantage of this, I’ve never tested it.
For about a year, I’ve been using the Sound Enhancer, with Sound Check and the Equalizer turned off, as follows:
On an Apple machine, you can access this screen by pressing the Apple-comma key combination when you are in iTunes.
As it turns out, this was pretty stupid. The Sound Enhancer feature could very well improve things if you have really bad speakers but it can actually result in a degradation of “Fi”, as it were, if your speakers are even slightly decent. You can read more about the technical details of what it does here, here and here. As you can see, it’s not really suitable for serious listening.
Casting around a bit on the Internet, I came up with the following, much improved, audio settings:
First, I turned on the Equalizer. To do this, select the iTunes Window menu and then choose Equalizer.
I have set my iTunes to use the Rock preset in the equaliser*. Most of the music that I listen to is rock, my second most frequent choice is classical. The Classical preset is so similar to the Rock one that I am content to leave it on these settings permanently.
You can also assign equaliser presets to specific songs by applying a setting to the Options tab of each song. I haven’t bothered with this just yet.
On my main iTunes Preferences screen, I’ve made the following changes:
As you can see, I’ve turned off Sound Enhancer and turned on Sound Check.
Apple gives a very good description of Sound Check here. Basically, this feature “normalises” the playback volume of your music files. This means that you will not have to keep adjusting the volume of your music because some songs are louder than others.
I find that Sound Check works very well for rock. I haven’t tried it out with classical music yet, where it could be a problem because some movements in classical pieces are supposed to be softer than others. It should be simple to turn it off if I want to do any serious classical listening.
The result of these changes is a spectacular improvement in sound from my MacBook. I’ll update this story with my findings after I have lived with the new settings for a while.
*: I’m South African, and we use proper English, so the feature is called Equalizer, but it is an example of an equaliser.
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