COconslit·May 14, 2025
AutoEq is a tool for automatically equalizing headphones.
-- https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq
In AutoEq: Automatic headphone equalization from frequency responsesjaakkopasanen
AutoEq
Python2020–2025
jaakkopasanen / AutoEq
AutoEq
Automatic headphone equalization from frequency responses
18Distinct people
18Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
16.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Automatic headphone equalization from frequency responses
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
i highly recommend https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq for headsets - though i have not added any of these to pipewire as it seems others have done [i still prefer…
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Also in these discussions
- wwmm/easyeffects · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-06-21 16:35:36 UTC to 2025-05-14 10:52:17 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
18 sourcesi highly recommend https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq for headsets - though i have not added any of these to pipewire as it seems others have done [i still prefer foobar2000 with APO + Peace + AutoEq]
In GPD Pocket 4 Speaker DSP: Configuring PipeWire so laptop speakers sound betterSuperlux HD681 Evo (offbrand AKG) + cheap USB DAC (FiiO E10K or so) + Equalizer APO (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results) = basically as good as it gets, without breaking the bank.
In Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 ModI wonder why you're on your third pair of Marshall Mode EQs :)
I'm partly having a go at them because I have a pair lying around that broke in less than a year. I usually go through a pair in a year (a year and a half) as I'm not very careful with the way I take care of my heaphones/in-ears. However, having said that, I think the EQs have a pretty mediocre build quality. For example, with the way I handled them, the cover of one in ear piece, fell of after a couple of months, and 6-8 months in the jack connector wires got a bit too much wear and tear and no longer connect properly. Also their EQ toggle made the treble (for the Electronic/DnB/Metal music I listen to) a bit too harsh.
Personally for earbuds/earphones I'd recommend anything which is as flat as possible and then you can boost up your preferred range. Alternatively you can go
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with a pair that has a measured profile (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq), which you can use to normalizes the frequency response and tweak it after.
For example I went with the cheap AKG Type-C earbuds, which have very harsh mids towards treble (https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/samsung/akg-type-c), but because their sound profile is within the database linked above, I could use Wavelet on Android to compensate for it (and EasyEffects on the desktop) to have them be as neutral as possible, and then boost on top of that. For a ~$10'ish pair of earbuds I am quite impressed. I also had to chose them because I have a "modern" phone that decided that a Jack is so 20th century.
Using this to equalise my headphones with the parameter sets on https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq. Highly recommended!
In Easy Effects: Audio effects for PipeWire applicationsAutoEq: Neutral equalization settings for 4000 headphone models
2 points · Open discussionare you talking about hardware or software DSP?
You could do it either way. Hardware solution like a MiniDSP, although it appears they have unfortunately discontinued their more affordable products. Or a software solution like EqualizerAPO (Windows) or SoundSource (Mac).
If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC
Quick summary.
1. You need a calibrated microphone like the uMik from MiniDSP or one from Dayton Audio. That's about $100, though, so that sort of kills the value equation in a lot of situations.[1]
2. You then measure the speaker's output with something such as a free tool called Room EQ Wizard: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
3. REQ can then output the necessary DSP configuration files, that can be then be used by a MiniDSP, EqualizerAPO, etc. Or it can just tell you the necessary corrections th
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at can then be manually typed into anything that supports parametric EQ settings.
Here's a video fully demonstrating all of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1aYsjPc2m4&t=2s
____
[1] There are community efforts to take these kinds of measurements and open source them so everybody can benefit. The largest I'm aware of is these open-sourced headphone measurements (which require a different sort of measurement rig) and corrections: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
For speakers, there are the measurements and EQ corrections published by places like AudioScienceReview.com and NoAudiophile.com
If you do software EQ and use other peoples' measurements you can do this for $0, without the grunt work of measurements.
I use AutoEQ (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq) for my headphones. It works by "parsing frequency response measurements and producing equalization settings which correct the headphone to a neutral sound". They also have a huge database of already measured and equalized data, which is what I use.
In TV backlight compensation (2020)Yes, but no, but yes.
AutoEq (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/) does something like this so... yes?
But targets various HRTF curves which aren't neutral or flat, and they usually aim for a Harman target of sorts, so no...
But there are some neutral-sounding curves that seek to just emulate pinna gain, so they have a ~3KHz peak which is required to 'emulate' the natural resonance of your ear, which you don't get naturally when you jam a driver all the way into it.
There's no AutoEq preset for the AS06s. Here's a representative sample targeting the 2019 Harman in-ear target for the KZ AS10s for funsies though: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
In Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakersAlso check https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects and https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq.
I wish https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/wiki/Community-Presets had more presets.
In An Introduction to PipeWireTo clarify things, PipeWire is an audio daemon, completely unaffiliated with https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq which is a set of headphone impulse responses. It just so happens that the recommended way to apply these impulse responses on Linux is EasyEffects, which now depends on both PipeWire and GTK4. Nonetheless, PipeWire is not EasyEffects and not AutoEq, and "Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though" is untrue because EasyEffects is not PipeWire's official GUI, and doesn't even come up when I search `pipewire gui`.
I haven't tested EasyEffects. With that in mind, PipeWire is buggy AF for the time being, and I've been working over the past week to clean things up (fixed a few bugs in plasmashell and pipewire so far, but I'm still learning and there's a great deal of bugs I haven't diagnosed and explained
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to the maintainers, it will probably take weeks longer for me to work through everything, and I'd very much prefer the program was written to handle race conditions and edge cases properly, instead of leaving users to discover bugs and trace the root cause through the labyrinthine IPC-heavy event-driven codebase after the fact).
Try to set up https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq impulse responses for headphones, and you _will_ inevitably hang your X. Daemon isn't terribly useful on its own if you can't set it up to do what you need. So anyone considering Pipewire as a "better" alternative to anything should also know, at a minimum, that it's difficult/impossible to uninstall and buggy AF.
In Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook ProIt even has settings for Apple’s Ear Pods [1] (the wired earbuds). I remember being surprised how applying these values makes them resemble regular headphones.
[1]: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
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