EasyEffects can apply a generic improvement for most small speakers.

Kittenlabs has a writeup of using Room EQ Wizard to measure impulse response of your specific speakers to create a proper correction. The results are pretty dramatic on a GPD palmtop.

https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2025/04/06/gpd-pocket-4-speaker-d...

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43635295

Last night I went through their guide on how to improve the sound of laptop speakers on my Framework. It's night and day, highly recommended.

https://wwmm.github.io/easyeffects/guides/guide_1.html

> In fact, I’d take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings.

Another important integration point would be the system volume control. If you could EQ your speakers to near flat response, and then apply loudness based on the volume control, you would get great sound at lower volumes without compromising the quality at higher volumes.

I do this currently with EasyEffects equalizer and loudness filters, but for best quality I need to keep the speakers and system volume at preset reference level and control the volume from the loudness filter volume setting.

> Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours.

Interesting article (audio processing should be a standard OS feature), but I wish we'd stop doing this. Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones), they’re supposed to be flat – “equalised”. At least if you want to hear the thing as it was mastered.

I think it just hurts consumers in the end, as it validates snake oil in the form of various ”enhancements”, like image processing on TVs. It makes stuff really hard to compare and much easier to sell shitty hardware.

Not that I’m opposed to improving shitty hardware with software, – quite the contrary – it’s just the murky subjectivity that irks me.

Audio quality is deeply objective, sorry. Audio embellishments and distortions are subjective.

Analogy: air quality.

What is clean air is objective. Perfumes and aromas are subjective (one man's rose is another's skunk), but they objectively worsen air quality.

Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result. Microphones are not perfect but a cheap microphone has much better frequency response than cheap speakers. If you assume the microphone is perfect you will get a pretty good result, probably better than a generic "laptop speaker" preset would be.

i use EE on my parents tv (minipc connected to offline 4koled) to address the "movie too quiet then way too loud" for them but there is a cost, latency

fortunately its not large enough to notice unless you already know (i.e. problem for me but not for thee) AND fortunately MPV .conf can set audio offset globally to sync everything nicely, so its not bothering them; but i disable it if im going to play games where i need split second audio cue/reaction

the lack of vst support though, seems like a terrible oversight. obs audio filters with stacked vsts and routing filters can unironically do this programs job better because of the vst support, and depending on the setup choices, with better latency too

It should self-tune, using a microphone to listen to tests played through its speakers, until it gets the transfer function right.

I had to go on a bit of a journey figuring out how to do anything useful with EasyEffects when I moved to Linux on my Microsoft brand laptop. I question the value of including it by default though. As the article notes, it's easy enough to install manually, and most people won't have any idea what to do to configure it usefully. Even after all my research and tweaking, my audio still has quirks that I don't even have the vocabulary for to be able to find fixes.

Laptop Manufacturers fail to appreciate how much better their product would be with good speakers. Particularly in today’s age where everyone is streaming music or watching videos much more than before.

MacBook Pro 16’s are great but most others suck.

I also often need EQ in the reverse situation, when I need less bass through my nice studio monitors when watching TV. Otherwise I’ll be watching Star Trek with dialogue at a normal volume and BOOM, the loudest photon torpedo you’ve ever heard.

I'm not having an issue with laptop with subpar speakers, but I don't see any way of not using EasyEffects. I'm running Arch on a Beelink SER8 through a focusrite 2i2 and into my Sony stereo receiver, out to floorstanding speakers. At the moment I am just using a slightly modified variation of one of the common community plugins, LoudnessEqualizer. For better or for worse, my ears are so accustomed to this. Elsewhere I also use it for things like dialogue boost and it surely does feel like overkill then, but convenient.

Now I am about to dig back into my Bitwig DAW, something I haven't done for many years, and dealing with all the issues around clean vs EasyEffects-modified sounds is daunting.

Shout-out to the PEQdB Diamond Target and the IG955, iykyk. I use those EQ filters to make my music listening experience considerably better. Your audio equipment most definitely sounds bad by default and needs equalization.

https://purl.stanford.edu/bp189zs9642

I can't find any before/after audio samples - can anybody point any out? I'd have thought it's about the first thing you'd do to show off the differences (I get it - it might not (probably won't be (?)) be tuned for my particular speaker... Still wouldn't hurt to hear an example).

Most windows laptops will do something like this by default to enhance the sound. Part of what ships as "Dolby Atmos" is some EQ-ing and normalization, with the default not being flat. It is just necessary to make those tiny laptop speakers sound half decent and not crap out all the time.

Does this make everything sound like those shitty gen Z speakers you hear everywhere these days? As someone into high end audio I really dislike that sound.

Really wished it worked with pulse or alsa. My distro does not natively support pipewire out of the box and I'm not interested in changing my setup.