Every speaker in Audiout gets its own equalizer — tone controls for boosting or cutting parts of the sound, per speaker, so a bass-heavy kitchen speaker and a thin bathroom one can both end up sounding right. The one exception is the Mac’s own row, which has no equalizer.
Opening it
Two ways in, from any speaker row in the mixer:
- Click the EQ button beside the row’s mute.
- Right-click the row and choose “Equalizer…”.
Both do the same thing: they open that speaker’s page on the Speakers tab. You can also go straight to the Speakers tab and pick the speaker in its sidebar. The mixer row itself never edits tone. Faders and mute change how loud a speaker is. The speaker’s page is where you change how it sounds.
The speaker’s page
The equalizer is the main event and is open when the page opens. Bass, treble, balance and loudness sit on top, and an Advanced fold holds a ten-band equalizer for finer control. Once you change the tone, the Equalizer heading’s icon turns green and a Reset button appears. Reset puts the speaker back to flat.
Below it, the page also holds:
- The speaker’s icon. Click it to open the icon picker and give the speaker a face that matches the room.
- Show in Mixer, which sets when the speaker appears in the Mixer (see Hide or show a speaker in the Mixer).
- Scenes, a link to each saved scene this speaker belongs to (see Scenes: saving sets of speakers).
- Password or Pairing, only for a speaker with a saved password or code, with a Forget button (see AirPlay speaker or TV asks for a password or code).
- Control speaker volume, on Bluetooth speakers only.
Which speakers have one
Every kind of speaker Audiout plays to gets the equalizer, with one exception: the Mac’s own row has none. AirPlay 2, AirPlay 1, Bluetooth, and Cast rows all carry the EQ button. What works with each kind of speaker has the full comparison.
What the equalizer is not
The equalizer changes tone, not timing. If a speaker sounds right but lands late, an echo trailing the other rooms, that’s a sync problem, not a tone problem. For a Bluetooth speaker, use “Align by ear…” or the SYNC chip on its row: Aligning a Bluetooth speaker that plays late.
And it changes tone, not volume. To make a room louder or quieter, use its fader in the mixer: The mixer: Main Audio, faders, and meters.
More help lives at the support overview.