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Mac Audio Controls Not Important Enough?


I own a Mac support company in The Netherlands. Even more important: I’ve been a sound engineer for the last two decades and have been a video-editor for 11 years. So a digital hub is REALLY my thing. This for background information.

There’s a thing that strikes me as somewhat strange, ever since the first Mac (LC) with a separate display: the video part of a Mac always has been adjustable and adaptable to a specific monitor and/or circumstances. Any setting in Colorsync, gamma, brightness, etc. is always effective on the whole platform. I mean: in any program you run.

Not so for audio. There’s a volume control, some input and output settings, and that’s it. Since recent iTunes versions, there’s an equalizer in iTunes too. But it only works for iTunes. That’s not good.

My music sounds OK for the speakers I use, but DVD’s, web sounds, iMovie sounds, etc. do not sound as good as they could. Why is there not an equalizer in the System Preferences Panel for Audio? A lot of us use third party speakers, don’t we?

One more reason to make equalizer settings outside of iTunes: any equalizer setting you make now is copied onto your iPod. It makes music sound terrible on the iPod. The setting was meant for the speakers on your Mac, wasn’t it?

So: rough adjustment would be great in an system wide equalizer, fine tuning on a song-by-song basis could be done in iTunes. It would really help overall audio quality, and the quality of the music on an iPod.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.