Audio Equalizer
Eight bands, four presets, and you hear it as you move them.
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Flat. The export will be identical to the source apart from the format change.
How to use it
- Drop an audio file onto the page. It is decoded by your browser, so a long DJ set opens as fast as a voice memo and nothing is uploaded.
- Pick a preset as a starting point, or leave it on Flat and go straight to the sliders.
- Move individual bands between -12 and +12 dB. The number beside each label is the current gain, and the box next to each slider takes an exact value if you know what you want.
- Press play (the preview is re-rendered with the current curve) and compare against the original by setting the preset back to Flat.
- Choose an output format and click Download.
What each band is for
An eight-band equalizer covers the audible range in steps of roughly one and a third octaves, which is coarse enough to be quick and fine enough to fix most tonal problems. Knowing what lives where saves a lot of blind dragging.
60 Hz is weight. The body of a kick drum, the bottom of a bass guitar, and the rumble of a truck outside the window. Phone speakers cannot reproduce it at all, so boosting here only pays off on headphones and real speakers. 150 Hz is warmth, and also where a small room adds its boom; a cut here is the single most common fix for a recording that sounds muddy. 400 Hz is the boxiness region. Too much and a voice sounds like it is coming from inside a cupboard. 1 kHz carries the honk and nasal quality; it is rarely a place to boost.
2.4 kHz is presence, and the ear is more sensitive here than anywhere else, which is why a small lift makes a voice jump forward and a large one becomes fatiguing within a minute.6 kHz holds consonant edge and sibilance; the difference between crisp and harsh is often two decibels here.12 kHz is air, the sense of open space around cymbals and breath. 16 kHz is sparkle, and frequently missing entirely from lossy files, because encoders discard the top octave first.
Cut first, boost second
Two identical-sounding results are available for most problems: boost what is missing, or cut what is masking it. The cut is almost always the better move. It costs no headroom, so nothing is pushed toward the 0 dBFS ceiling; it tends to sound less processed, because the ear notices added resonance faster than it notices removed resonance; and it leaves you room to raise the whole file afterwards, which is the same perceived change with none of the risk.
Move in small amounts. Three decibels is a clearly audible change on a single band; six is a heavy one; twelve is a special effect. If a curve needs more than a few decibels on several bands at once, the problem is usually the source rather than the tone. A microphone in the wrong place, or a room that needed treating.
Shelves, peaks, and why the ends are different
The six middle bands are peaking filters. Each one makes a bell-shaped bump or dip centred on its frequency, tapering off toward its neighbours, so the bands overlap slightly and a smooth curve can be drawn across them. The 60 Hz and 16 kHz controls are shelves instead: they act on everything below or above their corner rather than around a centre point.
That is a deliberate choice, not a shortcut. A bell centred at 16 kHz has most of its energy above the top of human hearing, so it would be nearly inaudible; a shelf lifts the whole top octave and does what "more air" actually means. The same logic applies at the bottom, where "more bass" means everything under the corner, not a single resonant note at 60 Hz.