- AirPods finally get a universal custom EQ
- You will be able to see the results live while a song plays.
- It is scheduled to arrive in iOS 27, as part of the AirPods settings screen.
Apple just announced that one of the most requested features by AirPods users is finally coming as part of iOS 27: a custom equalizer. Announced during the WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple hasn’t revealed all the details of the feature, but we got our first glimpse of it.
There will be a screen that looks like the image at the top of this page and if you tap “Customize”, a blue line will be overlaid on the frequency graph. It looks like you can move the blue line to increase or decrease the frequency bands.
There’s a live waveform that plays back, so it looks like you’ll be able to see the result in the live sound signature, as well as hear it, obviously.
In the past, it was possible to make some changes to the sound of AirPods using accessibility tools, but this is not really designed to make subtle changes to your music profile, but is instead designed for people with hearing problems to increase the frequencies they have difficulty with.
There has also been an equalizer in Apple Music, but that doesn’t help if you use another app for music and it doesn’t preserve the equalizer when you switch devices or other apps in general.
There are interesting differences in the sound of the different AirPods models. The original AirPods Max are much more neutral than the AirPods Pro 3, for example, and I can easily see how some people might choose to give their ears a little more pop at times, or maybe they want to just take a little edge off the headphones.
However! The obvious thing missing from the images we’ve seen so far is a clear option to save presets, so the scenario I described above might not be so easy. This could be in the final version of course, or there could be a way to create it using Shortcuts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple keeps this pretty basic, though. The screen doesn’t really encourage you to make changes: the description in settings says: “AirPods are designed and manufactured by Apple to faithfully represent music, TV shows, movies, and calls. If you prefer a different sound profile, you can customize how AirPods represent any played audio.”
Still, given that the original AirPods model launched in December 2016, I’m glad we finally have it as an option.
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