iTunes "Sound Enhancer" Question

[ying yang]

In the last few weeks I started to notice that some of my songs were sounding terrible playing on my laptop. I thought it was because they were low bitrate or something, and some were, but other were bought from iTunes so shouldn't sound like streams. Turns out the "sound enhancer" option in iTunes was turned up all the way.

Anyway, my question is what is the default setting for this? It is even on at all. I think I might have turned it on on a whim but I now realise everything sounded fine before I had touched it but I can't remember what it was set to.

 

[Fearless Leader]

all sound enhancer does is make loud things quieter, and quiet things louder. as with all lossless compressions they sound great until you start noticing things. I have been shown what to listen for and the itunes encoding from the store is ok but not great to me. however someone who doesnt notice the artifacts wont notice or care. my point to all that is you probably just started realizing how bad the sound really is, go to amazon.com they have really good sounding mp3 (well compared to itunes) and compare a few songs. or get a physical cd and compare

 

[kolax]

Makes it "brighter" - that is what it sounds like to me anyway. When I stream audio to my Apple TV to my Home Cinema system, it boosts the presence of the sound.

Also, I use the intro to Sweet Child O' Mine as a comparison for a lot of things - and when sound enhancer is turned all the way up, it give the same sound as my Home Cinema does when I enable surround sound.

But in saying that, I have noticed it does cause songs to sometimes sound like they have half their actual bit rate.

 

[Killyp]

Turns up bass + treble and does some weird imaging stuff which only makes things sound worse.

I always leave it off, like the iTunes EQ and the built-in Volume Control...

 

[ying yang]

Yeah, I now know what the effect is, so I want to revert to the default setting that it was at when I installed iTunes. I can't remember what it was set to or if it was even checked.

 

[Jolly Jimmy]

I have the sound enhancer, sound check and EQ off, but IIRC the sound enhancer was on half way by default out of the box.

 

[darkcurse]

all sound enhancer does is make loud things quieter, and quiet things louder...

I thought thats what the Sound Check option in iTunes prefs were for. Isn't Sound enhancer something like SRS WOW?