EasyEffects can massively improve laptop speaker sound quality

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

https://purl.stanford.edu/bp189zs9642

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.

Just seconding this so other framework owners may give it a try. The speakers on my 13" are pretty bad, but using easy effects made them plenty "fine". Without, it sounded like absolute trash.

Some time ago, I’ve come across an Asahi patch to I think Pipewire that tied system volume to a Macbook-specific loudness compensation filter, but I couldn’t figure out how to actually make use of it outside of their environment.

> Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones)

I don't think this has been true in my lifetime, at least. Some brands being known for "warmth" vs "brightness" is ages old, before the idea of audiophile earbuds was even a thing. At the extreme end, you can go back at least 40 years to see people with dedicated sub outputs and massively-oversized non-flat subwoofer setups.

Speakers, at least the great majority of them, are not flat. Can you not hear differences between speakers? Studio monitors typically aim for a flat response, but most barely make an acceptable approximation. And then we're not even discussing phone and tv speakers or the fact that a flat response for pure tones doesn't necessarily translate to one for complex sounds.

I have heard that audio engineer's don't necessarily master to a flat EQ because such a small section of listeners are listening with a flat EQ. Most are using car speakers, airpods, etc so they master it based on those expectations.

The definition of sound quality tends to change between people.

My definition is pretty much the same as yours here, but I know quite a few people who hate listening to music on anything with a relatively flat frequency response.

Why would speakers be any different than earphones? Botu are subjective ; I personally hate flat eq. I've listened to numerous products, some worth thousands of dollars, and I'll always take some sort of slight bass and treble boost over flat eq. I'll even take a big bass boost over no bass boost at all.

Omnidirectional electret mics are nearly dead flat right out of the box, and cheap.

> Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result.

https://peqdb.com/#speakers

You need an omnidirectional mic.

The software driving them is good.

If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.

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

the DSP at play here is more than just an equalizer, and as such an audio file cannot be produced to illustrate the differences in a meaningful way to unknown target speakers

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.

> Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result.

https://peqdb.com/#speakers

You need an omnidirectional mic.

Omnidirectional electret mics are nearly dead flat right out of the box, and cheap.

I recommend trying out PulseEffects, my understanding is that EasyEffects is the same project they just did a rename of it. You might be stuck on an older version or something not exactly sure.

> Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones)

Just seconding this so other framework owners may give it a try. The speakers on my 13" are pretty bad, but using easy effects made them plenty "fine". Without, it sounded like absolute trash.

The definition of sound quality tends to change between people.

My definition is pretty much the same as yours here, but I know quite a few people who hate listening to music on anything with a relatively flat frequency response.

Sure but they’ve always been mastered with the same setup, so the bar has not changed. And anything flavoured will not work universally for all types of music or other kinds of audio (like voice calls are really hard to understand with bassy speakers).

In my understanding, this whole thing is basically 1:1 with color spaces in display tech, except with pictures/video you at least get to encode what you targeted, versus with audio, you don't.

Is this incorrect?

> Why would speakers be any different than earphones

There are various "ideal" EQ targets for earphones depending on what your model of an ideal audio source is. They all start with a flat response speaker, from then you can model:

- Two speakers right next to the listener's ears. (flat)

- A single speaker 1 metre away in the x axis, in an infinitely-sized anechoic room. (free field)

- Two speakers 30 cm away pointing to a plastic torso at a 90° angle, in a room with reverberations. (B&K/Harman)

- A spherical room lined with speakers, point listener in the centre with no reverberation. (diffuse field)

- An infinite wall of speakers 1 metre away in the x axis. (another method for free field)

- etc

Earphones are forgoing the outer parts of your ears and skull.

Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.

Like, literally.

It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.

Yeah exactly. They're still a far cry from a MacBook but at least it doesn't sound like it's inside a tin can.

Would you be able to export and share your settings as a preset?

Maybe I should’ve said “never meant to be subjective” – I meant the target.

I wonder how much of this comes down to marketing… I keep coming back to Posy’s “Desirable Nonsense” video [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/B_8HDPBfvHI

The software driving them is good.

the DSP at play here is more than just an equalizer, and as such an audio file cannot be produced to illustrate the differences in a meaningful way to unknown target speakers

I recommend trying out PulseEffects, my understanding is that EasyEffects is the same project they just did a rename of it. You might be stuck on an older version or something not exactly sure.

> Why would speakers be any different than earphones

There are various "ideal" EQ targets for earphones depending on what your model of an ideal audio source is. They all start with a flat response speaker, from then you can model:

- Two speakers right next to the listener's ears. (flat)

- A single speaker 1 metre away in the x axis, in an infinitely-sized anechoic room. (free field)

- Two speakers 30 cm away pointing to a plastic torso at a 90° angle, in a room with reverberations. (B&K/Harman)

- A spherical room lined with speakers, point listener in the centre with no reverberation. (diffuse field)

- An infinite wall of speakers 1 metre away in the x axis. (another method for free field)

- etc

Maybe I should’ve said “never meant to be subjective” – I meant the target.

I wonder how much of this comes down to marketing… I keep coming back to Posy’s “Desirable Nonsense” video [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/B_8HDPBfvHI

Would you be able to export and share your settings as a preset?

I appreciate it’s more sophisticated than a simple 5-band e.q. - but it’d still be interesting to hear unprocessed/processed.

Yeah exactly. They're still a far cry from a MacBook but at least it doesn't sound like it's inside a tin can.

Earphones are forgoing the outer parts of your ears and skull.

Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.

Like, literally.

It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.

In my understanding, this whole thing is basically 1:1 with color spaces in display tech, except with pictures/video you at least get to encode what you targeted, versus with audio, you don't.

Is this incorrect?

Mastering is done with the target in mind. There's tons of great videos by Masahiro Sakurai (Creator of Smash Bros.), one of which covers how they use typical household TVs to tune the audio/video for the game because relying on top-end audio/video equipment will result in worse results for the player.

Tangent, but I found that a bass shaker / transducer massively improved my speaker experience without requiring a subwoofer. I built the subwoofer first, but it would annoy everyone around me and it was really spotty depending on its location, the exact layout of the room, etc. Slapped a bass shaker underneath me and it really completes the experience without annoying everybody else.

Yeah that's pretty good way to put it, except I'd say the average person is using way better screens with smartphones than the quality of speakers/headphones their using.

I appreciate it’s more sophisticated than a simple 5-band e.q. - but it’d still be interesting to hear unprocessed/processed.

Yeah that's pretty good way to put it, except I'd say the average person is using way better screens with smartphones than the quality of speakers/headphones their using.

Home > Multimedia, AV > EasyEffects should be part of every Linux distribution and desktop environment to massively improve laptop speaker sound quality

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It’s the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can’t exactly overcome physics – laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers – there’s a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you’re a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it’s just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux’ advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop’s speakers.

The OSNews 2026 Fundraiser

8,823 / 15,000

➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer* ➡️ Buy merch from our store ➡️ Why a fundraiser?

~~€5000 incentive: Make me use Windows 11 for a month~~ (the results were not great)
> €10000: Video tour of my office and my computers/devices collection <
€15000: Buy a Mac and use macOS for a month (and review it)
€20000: I get an OSNews tattoo

*Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS

EasyEffects’ own description on its GitHub page doesn’t really explain what it does or what it’s capable of, so here’s the description from Wikipedia instead.

EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line.

Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer.

↫ EasEffects’ Wikipedia page

None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs.

What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio – MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more – aren’t magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery.

If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better.

In an ideal world, you’d pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won’t find one, so for most laptops you’ll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I’ve long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I’ve tried it on, but of course, there’s countless other presets for you to try to see if there’s anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better.

Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution’s package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They’ll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly.

There’s obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you’re most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there’s no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I’m talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE’s System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything.

Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I’ve ever tried it on, that I’ve become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you’re already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset.

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. They shouldn’t include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features.

There’s absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning, and yet, very few people seem to actually be aware of this. This needs to change, and I think it’s up to distributions, desktop environments, and Linux OEMs to make this happen.

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

EasyEffects can massively improve laptop speaker sound quality

Discussion

Discussion

The OSNews 2026 Fundraiser