The best EQ settings for every music genre — and why you shouldn't have to know them

Hip-hop wants sub-bass. Classical wants to be left alone. Here are the curves that actually work per genre, what each move does, and how to stop setting them by hand.

Search for equaliser settings and you get a wall of numbers: 60 Hz +4, 230 Hz -2, 3 kHz +3. They're offered as though every pair of ears, every set of earbuds and every song wants the same thing. None of that is true. But the reasoning behind the numbers is worth understanding, because once you see what each band is doing you can stop copying tables.

What the bands actually do

Sub-bass, roughly 20 to 60 Hz, is the part you feel more than hear. Bass, 60 to 250 Hz, is where a kick drum lands. The low mids, 250 to 500 Hz, are where things go muddy when you overdo it. The upper mids, 2 to 4 kHz, carry vocal intelligibility — push them and a voice cuts through, push too far and it turns shrill. Above 8 kHz is air: cymbals, breath, the sense of space around a recording.

Curves that work, genre by genre

Hip-hop and R&B: lift the sub-bass, but hold the low mids back rather than boosting them too, or the vocal drowns. The mistake is treating 'more bass' as one slider — it isn't, and the difference between 50 Hz and 200 Hz is the difference between weight and mud.

Classical and jazz: do almost nothing. These are recordings made in real rooms by engineers who already balanced them. A little air above 10 kHz is usually all that helps. Anything more and you are arguing with the person who mixed it.

Electronic: tighten the low end rather than raising it. A boosted 60 Hz on a fast kick smears the transient and the track loses its drive — the thing you actually wanted was definition, not volume.

Rock and metal: the guitars live in the upper mids, and so does harshness. Small moves here, a decibel or two, change more than a big move anywhere else.

Podcasts and audiobooks: pull the bass down and bring the vocal range forward. Speech needs clarity, not weight, and most music presets actively work against it.

The problem with all of the above

You set a curve for hip-hop. Then a piano piece comes on, and the curve is still there, still boosting a sub-bass region that has nothing in it and holding back mids the piano needs. The settings were right for one track and wrong for the next, and the only fix is to open an app and change them, which nobody does mid-song.

Letting the earbuds do it

This is the problem Auto-EQ exists to solve. STELLARvibe reads the track you're about to play, works out what kind of music it is, and loads a matching curve in about 180 milliseconds — before the first beat, not thirty seconds in. There are 17 tuned presets behind it, and detection runs on your device, so nothing about what you listen to leaves your phone.

You keep the manual control. Every preset can be edited and saved, and if you build something better than ours you can send it to someone with Share EQ as a link or a QR code. But the default behaviour is that you never think about it, which for most people most of the time is the correct amount to think about an equaliser.