Theoretically, you shouldn’t have to adjust the EQ of the music playing to your HomePod. Between all the fancy music processing, and the HomePod’s ability to tailor its sound to the size and shape of your room, music should come out sounding pretty great already. But that doesn’t account for taste. Maybe you like a whole lot of extra bass? Or maybe a certain frequency is booming in your room, and the HomePod isn’t doing anything about it.

Then you should try EQ. The bad news is that the HomePod has no native EQ. The good news is that it’s easy to adjust on your Mac or iPhone.

HomePod’s auto EQ is probably good enough already

If you want to tweak the EQ of your HomePod just because you can, that’s cool and all, but first consider that you probably don’t need to. The HomePod is a speaker with a computer inside, and it uses an array of microphones to analyse the sound reflecting around the room, auto-correcting for the room’s acoustics, as well as setting the EQ curve (bass and treble, for example) to best match the song.

It makes sense, then, that there are no user-adjustable EQ settings. But you can get around that by streaming your music to the HomePod using AirPlay, and setting the EQ on the sending device — a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

How to stream music to HomePod with AirPlay

To use this trick, you first need to stream your music to the HomePod using AirPlay. Instead of using Hey Siri to tell your HomePod to play a song, you should play that song either in the Music app on your iOS device, or in iTunes on your Mac. Then, using the AirPlay panel, pick your HomePod as a destination speaker. Here’s that panel on the Mac:

And here it is on an iPhone:

How to tweak the music EQ on Mac

Whatever music app you’re using, it probably has EQ settings. Today we’ll look at iTunes’ EQ panel. To open it, launch iTunes, and click Menubar>iTunes>Equalizer, or hit Option-Command-E on the keyboard. In this EQ window, you can choose a preset, or move the sliders to tweak the various frequencies yourself.

In the drop-down presets list, you’ll also see options to save the current EQ settings as a preset, and to edit your preset list.

How to tweak the music EQ on iOS

On iOS, the EQ settings are buried in Settings>Music>EQ, down in the Playback section of the Music preferences. Click there and you’ll be able to pick from one of the presets. Unlike the Mac, there’s no way to manually edit the EQ sliders, so you’re stuck with the presets. In my testing, any custom presets you save do not get synced across from iTunes on your Mac, which is a shame. Then again, I never use the EQ settings, so I don’t really care.

On iOS, EQ is relegated to the Settings app.