What do the Sony WF-1000XM6's EQ presets sound like?

So you’re thinking about getting the Sony WF-1000XM6 and you’re wondering if you can tweak the sound if you don’t like it out of the box. But EQ sliders aren’t all that great, and you can’t always fix things easily by ear. What now? Well, I took the Sony WF-1000XM6 through the lab, and measured how the earbuds perform with each of the stock EQ presets with the top-of-the-line headphone measuring equipment.

Where are the EQ presets in the Sound Connect App?

After you’ve connected the Sony WF-1000XM6 to your phone, you can install Sony’s Sound Connect app to unlock access to advanced features, room simulation modes, and more. But today we’re looking for the EQ menu.

1. Open the app and connect the Sony WF-1000XM6.
2. Once you’re into the main screen of the app, hunt for the “Equalizer” tile, and tap it to open.
3. Inside this menu, you can use the 10-slider EQ, or adjust presets.

I find that getting a preset that sounds better than stock to you is a good place to start, and then you can tweak the sliders to fit your tastes after. Use the Custom preset options to lock these adjustments in so that you can return to your preferred tuning later if you try something new.

For the hardcore nerds, it’s a bit of a letdown that the EQ interface here is a traditional band-slider type, and not a parametric EQ. While that style of equalizer is becoming more common, it’s still too much to expect your average person to be able to navigate all that well — so we’re not surprised to see its absence here. Were there a parametric EQ in the Sound Connect app, our recommendations would be far more exacting, though.

What issues should EQ fix?

Looking at the frequency response of the Sony WF-1000XM6 (blue), we can see a few areas that could be improved with equalization. For example, with ANC on, there’s a really odd kind of shelf filter from 500Hz and below bumping up bass a little much in relation to the rest of the sound. There’s also a bit of a dip at 700Hz that sounds a little odd, though not terribly displeasing. There’s also a strange overemphasis between 4 and 8kHz, but some may actually like that if they have trouble hearing room effects in their music.

Because the response’s issues are pretty strange in some places, and the fact that the band-slider type of equalizer doesn’t allow as granular adjustments as we might want, options for addressing some of these issues will be problematic. For example, using even a single slider without having a good handle on how it affects the response near its center frequency will lead to odd results if you’re not careful. Because of that, I suggest finding a preset close to what you want, and then adjusting from there.

For now, the most egregious thing we should be focusing on is that wide shelf filter being a little too strong for the highs. Bass lovers may want to nudge up the sub-bass, but they’ll also need to bring up the highs as well to make sure that the sound doesn’t get too weird as a result of their tinkering. If we can find an EQ preset that does just that from the get-go, we should have a decent starting point for most.

If you’re not looking to absolutely rattle your inner ear into powder, you might look for a way to tamp that shelf down instead so that the response is closer to our preference curve before applying any other adjustments. Doing this will then make it necessary to address the mids, but we’ll get to that when we get there.

Try turning the ANC off

Usually, I don’t like telling people to turn off a product’s hallmark feature, but in this case, it’s worth a go. I say that only because the response of the Sony WF-1000XM6 improves quite a lot in the mids when you turn off ANC.

I’ve run across several products that have odd issues like the above, but it’s notable on the Sony WF-1000XM6 because of the dip at 700Hz. While you might adjust to this quite quickly, purists may want to give turning off the ANC a try when there’s not a lot of outside noise to dispel. This will give you a tuning far closer to our preference curve that you can adjust more easily without introducing strange artefacts. Just remember to adhere to best practices and you should be golden.

In order to make the adjustments easier to read, the below charts show only how the presets affect the response of the earbuds, not the whole frequency response chart. These adjustments work in the same way whether you have ANC on or off.

Clear EQ

This EQ preset pushes highs up a bit, and is a bit more reasonable in its balance of bass to treble than the stock tuning while ANC is on. However, it does push that overemphasis between 4 and 8kHz past +5dB, which may make that region sound a bit worse to those listening to loud or busy content.

Hard EQ

The Hard EQ pushes up the sub-bass while also boosting highs. This is a much better preset for those who like a more Harman-style tuning, or even just a tuning with more bass and treble to it. While it’s definitely far from our preferences here at SoundGuys, this style of tuning has been a favorite for years.

Heavy EQ

Heavy EQ bumps up the sub bass just like the Hard EQ, but without any of the increased emphasis to treble. This tends to make the earbuds sound a bit muffled, so it’s much harder to make adjustments to this preset as a starting point. If you like the bass of the Heavy EQ, you may have an easier time just sticking to the Hard EQ and adjusting highs from there.

Soft EQ

Soft EQ does a great job at ripping down most of that odd shelf filter we saw on the baseline measurement, but because it doesn’t extent to 500Hz: there’s still a weird transition from high bass to low mids. You may have luck hitting one of the nearby sliders to notch it down a couple dB, but I didn’t have much luck in the lab. This preset also attenuates the highs a bit, leading to a somewhat dull sound. If you use this preset as a starting point, your biggest headache is going to be the mids, as the weird peak at 450Hz isn’t quite in line with the EQ sliders, and it’s immediately followed by a dip at 700Hz, also difficult to EQ away.

Game EQ

From this adjustment chart, it should be fairly obvious that the Game EQ preset is mainly geared toward boosting important sounds for games like footsteps and gunfire rather than tune headphones for music. Consequently, we’re just going to leave this here and not offer advice on how to improve it. Most games have different sound designs, effects, and important auditory cues, so we have no way of identifying what’s going to be right for you here.

What do you think?

Do you own the Sony WF-1000XM6? Have you tried these presets? Which one is your favorite? We’re always looking for real-world feedback, so feel free to sound off below.