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Want to upgrade the sound quality of your earbuds or headphones? There are two Android apps that I love for this. They don’t need you to be an audiophile, and they require no technical knowledge, yet they produce amazing results.
SoundID: A Simpler Way to Use Equalizers
SoundID is an ingenious app that uses short audio tests to create a personalized sound profile that is unique to you.
You normally need to use an equalizer for this, either through a dedicated app or something like the one built into Spotify. Yet equalizers are deceptively complicated. If you don’t know what you’re listening for, it’s possible to actually make the sound worse without even realizing it.
SoundID de-mystifies the process. It plays you a music track in a series of variations, you pick the ones you like best, and then it mashes the results together to create a sound profile that matches your taste and fits the quality of your headphones. The app is free. You don’t even need to create an account to use it, although it’s worth doing to save your results.
To get started, click through the setup wizard and select “Hearing Test” when prompted. The test takes around three minutes and is pretty easy—just follow the onscreen instructions.
The first part checks the sensitivity of your ears and earbuds and how well you can hear certain tones through each ear.
Then, you move on to the audio test. Pick a track that matches your preferred style, and you’ll be played a series of variations. Toggle between options A and B for each, picking the one you like before moving on to the next.
Finally, you’re prompted to play some music of your own choosing, and you can compare how it sounds with your new profile turned on and off.
You can repeat the test if you aren’t happy with the results and also create separate profiles for different earbud models. Plus, you can quickly disable the profile through a notification, which is useful if you regularly switch between music and voice, for example.
SoundID has more features if you want them. You can opt to use the most popular user profiles for your earbuds and delve into a very complex equalizer if you really want to. But it’s the hearing test that makes the app unique, fun, and useful.
Wavelet: One-Click Sound Profiles Designed for Your Specific Earbuds
If you’re less concerned about tailoring the sound to your personal taste and simply want to get the best sound quality from your earbuds or headphones, then Wavelet is the app for you.
It offers pre-made audio profiles for more than 5000 brands and models of earbuds, which Wavelet says correspond to “the optimal frequency response compensation for those specific headphone models.” In other words, they’re tuned precisely for your hardware’s capabilities, and you can enable it with pretty much a single click.
It couldn’t be easier to set up. Connect your earbuds and start playing some music. In Wavelet, tap “AutoEq.” On the next screen, you can load the preset for your specific earbuds. Tap on “Headphone model” and start typing the brand name, then select the product name from the list when it appears.
Toggle on the AutoEq slider and you’ll hear it take effect immediately. In my experience, it’s pretty great. If you’re happy with how it sounds, you don’t need to go any further.
But you can use the Graphic Equalizer to fine-tune the sound to taste if you want to. Leave AutoEq turned on, then add, say, “Bass boost” or “Voice” to fit the type of audio you listen to.
There are more options, but most people won’t need them. “Equal Loudness” is a paid feature that ensures all tracks play at the same volume level; “Limiter” dampens the louder parts of audio where there’s a big difference between the quietest and loudest sections. For the most part, though, you can just leave Wavelet running, and you won’t have to think about it again.
SoundID is a great app if you want to take control of how your music sounds, and it’s fun to play around with, but I settled on using Wavelet due to its combination of ease of use and high-quality results. I’d recommend giving both apps a whirl to see which works best for you.
