Equalizer
The Equalizer lets you shape the tone of playback across eight frequency bands. It’s available to everyone — there is no Pro gate on the equalizer.
Opening the Equalizer
Tap the ⊟ Sliders icon in the action button row on the Now Playing screen.
[SCREENSHOT: Sliders / equalizer button in the Now Playing action row]
The equalizer opens as a panel over the current screen. Playback continues while it’s open, so you can hear each adjustment as you make it.
Tap the ✕ in the panel header to close it.
The Bands
[SCREENSHOT: Equalizer panel — eight vertical band sliders with dB readouts]
There are eight bands, each a vertical slider with the frequency and its current gain printed underneath:
| Band | Centre frequency | What it affects |
|---|---|---|
| 60 | 60 Hz | Sub-bass — kick drum weight, room rumble |
| 170 | 170 Hz | Bass — bass guitar and low synth body |
| 310 | 310 Hz | Low-mid — warmth, and where “boxy” lives |
| 600 | 600 Hz | Mid — body of guitars and lower vocals |
| 1K | 1 kHz | Upper-mid — vocal presence, snare crack |
| 3K | 3 kHz | Presence — intelligibility and attack |
| 6K | 6 kHz | High — brightness, cymbal edge |
| 12K | 12 kHz | Air — top-end sparkle, tape hiss |
Each band is a peaking filter, so a change lifts or dips a region around its centre frequency and leaves the neighbouring bands broadly alone. The eight filters run in series, which means overlapping boosts add up — two adjacent bands at +6 dB will sound louder than either alone.
Adjusting a Band
Drag a slider up to boost, down to cut.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Range | −12 dB to +12 dB |
| Step | 0.1 dB |
| Default | 0.0 dB (flat) |
The readout under each slider updates live and is colour-coded so you can scan the curve without reading numbers:
- Green — the band is boosted
- White — the band is cut
- Grey — the band is flat
The value is shown to one decimal place with an explicit sign, e.g. +3.5dB or -1.2dB.
Reset
The ↺ Reset button in the panel header returns all eight bands to 0.0 dB in one tap. It is not undoable — but flat is easy enough to get back to by ear.
There Are No Presets
The equalizer is fully manual. There is no Flat, Bass Boost, Treble Boost, or Vocal preset, and there is no way to save a curve of your own. ↺ Reset is the only stored shape, and it’s flat.
If you want a starting point:
- More low end — 60 at +4, 170 at +2, leave everything else flat
- Vocal clarity — 1K at +2, 3K at +3, 310 at −2
- Brighter, more open — 6K at +2, 12K at +3
- Tame harsh headphones — 3K at −3, 6K at −2
Small moves go a long way. Cuts almost always sound more natural than boosts.
Working With the Other Audio Modes
The equalizer is independent of Homecrate’s spatial modes and can be combined with either of them:
| Mode | Combines with the EQ? |
|---|---|
| Spectral 3D Sound | Yes |
| Spatial Audio playback | Yes |
| Karaoke / synced lyrics | Yes — lyrics are visual only |
Spectral 3D and Spatial Audio are mutually exclusive with each other, but neither one disables the equalizer.
Current Limitations
These are real behaviours of the current build, not bugs to work around:
- Your curve is not saved. The gains stay applied to the running audio engine, but the next time you open the panel every slider reads 0.0 dB again. There is no persisted equalizer profile.
- No presets and no user profiles, as described above.
- Streams are the weak case. For locally stored files the eight-band filter chain does the work. On a source the processing graph can’t take over — most commonly a Plex streaming URL rather than a downloaded copy — the equalizer falls back to an overall level adjustment derived from the average of your band gains, so you’ll hear a volume change rather than true tone shaping. Downloading the track locally restores full per-band behaviour. See Downloading Tracks for Offline Use.
- Large boosts can clip. Because the bands sum, pushing several sliders towards +12 dB on an already-loud master can distort. If you hear crunch on peaks, cut the bands you don’t want instead of boosting the ones you do.
Tips
- Set the equalizer while a familiar track is playing — a song you know well makes a 1 dB move obvious.
- If you’re chasing a “muddy” sound, try cutting 310 before boosting anything.
- Reset to flat before evaluating a new pair of headphones. It’s easy to mistake an old curve for a hardware characteristic.