I didn’t love the Sony 1000X The Collexion until I tried this setting

The Sony 1000X The Collexion certainly look and feel like premium headphones, but I wasn’t sold on how they sounded out of the box. The stock tuning sounded pretty dark to me, and I wanted more treble strength and attack, particularly from cymbals and percussion.

Then I tried Sony’s Find Your Equalizer. Instead of making me fiddle with EQ sliders, the feature had me listen to a series of options and choose which I preferred. A few minutes later, it had created an EQ that addressed almost exactly what I’d been missing, and completely changed how much I enjoyed listening to the headphones.

What is Sony’s Find Your Equalizer?

Sony’s Find Your Equalizer is basically a shortcut for anyone who wants to adjust how their headphones sound without the guesswork of adjusting a graphic EQ. Start playing a song you know well from your library, and the Sony app presents five different sound options. Pick your favorite, and it gives you another, narrower set of choices based on that selection.

One of my favorite things about the feature is that you listen to your own music the entire time. Instead of judging the changes with a generic sample, you can put on an album or song you know inside and out and hear exactly how each option changes it.

Once you’re done, the app turns those preferences into an EQ automatically. Better yet, Sony lets you switch between “Before” and “After” on the final screen, so I could immediately compare my new EQ against the stock tuning.

You’re not locked into whatever Find Your Equalizer gives you, either. If it gets you 90% of the way there, you can use that EQ as a starting point and customize it with smaller adjustments. Maybe you want a little more treble strength or bass strength. You can make those changes yourself without starting from scratch, or run Find Your Equalizer again if you want a completely different result.

Did Find Your Equalizer actually improve the sound?

For me, absolutely. But I think the best thing about Find Your Equalizer is that it forces you to stop looking at numbers, frequencies, and sliders and simply trust your ears.

That’s exactly what I did. I played music I knew well, listened to each option, and picked the one I liked. I wasn’t thinking about whether I needed to boost 4kHz or 8kHz or wondering which slider I should move next.

Funny enough, when I finished, the EQ Sony created had boosted the upper frequencies I already felt were missing. The stock tuning sounded dark to me, and I wanted more treble strength and attack from cymbals and percussion. By doing nothing more than listening and choosing what I preferred, I ended up in pretty much the same place I would have tried to get to manually.

That doesn’t mean you should pick an EQ and immediately call it done. Listen to a few of your favorite songs or albums and spend some time with the result. What grabs you immediately might not be what you prefer after an entire album, so give yourself some time before making another adjustment.

Should you use Find Your Equalizer on the Sony 1000X The Collexion?

Yes, especially if you put on the Sony 1000X The Collexion for the first time and aren’t completely sold on how they sound. Find Your Equalizer takes a few minutes, requires basically zero EQ knowledge, and gives you an easy way to find a sound you prefer.

More importantly, don’t assume the way headphones sound out of the box is the way they have to sound forever. You’ve already spent a lot of money on them, so why not spend a few minutes seeing if you can make them better suited to what you like?

That’s what changed the 1000X The Collexion for me. I didn’t love the stock tuning, but once I found an EQ I preferred, I enjoyed the headphones a whole lot more.