The new custom EQ feature will be supported on AirPods Max 2, AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4.
Prakhar Khanna
Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 26 was more about fulfilling past promises than making new ones. While we waited for OS-centric upgrades, Apple Intelligence and the much-anticipated Siri AI took center stage at the event. The new iOS 27 update promises to make your iPhone faster and more responsive, but there’s one more feature related to AirPods that I’m excited about. Apple briefly mentioned this announcement in a few sentences at the event, but here’s why it matters.
AirPods are all set to get a custom EQ for the first time. Apple has always sworn by its sound engineers, who built AirPods to sound as good as possible — a version of this is still listed in a settings footnote. However, people have different tastes and not everyone may like the default tuning. This is why having an adjustable EQ is a big deal.
You can now customize the tuning of your AirPods if you prefer a different sound profile. It will give you more freedom to customize the sound. For surround, Apple’s headphones and earphones have had their own adaptive EQ so far, but they didn’t let you set the EQ yourself. You could only change the AirPods sound profile through the Apple Music settings. Now, you get a 3-band equalizer (low, mid, high).
AirPods’ custom EQ feature in iOS 27 is relatively easy to use. You’ll get a low, mid, and treble graph with simple knobs that you can raise or lower to adjust those frequencies. You can find it in the Settings menu and it will be supported on AirPods Max 2, AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4.
Once you add a custom profile, it will continue along with Apple’s recommended EQ profile. However, from the photo shared by the company, it looks like you won’t be able to create multiple custom profiles. Apple says you can “seamlessly switch back and forth to the default AirPods sound tuning.”
While Apple’s custom EQ settings don’t seem as powerful as those of its rivals, they are simple. By comparison, Bose offers a 20-point scale for adjusting bass, mids and treble in its audio products, while JBL has a detailed equalizer with 10 frequency bands adjustable in Hz.
