14-inch MacBook Pro speakers sound muffled

[doug2 (douglerner)]

@trilo

On YouTube, the voice overs are perhaps a little too spacial - sounds like a bit of a gap in the middle field and the bass is a little heavy. I downloaded and installed eqMac and set it to Spoken Word. I found it closely reflected what I would have expected and have no issue with it. The Spoken Word setting simple pulls down the 32hz bass tone and slightly boosts the mid-high tones (500-2k).

I have it in the menu bar and will flick it on when needed but i doubt I’ll use it much. I guess sound clarity is a very subjective thing.

I find either Spoken Word or Vocal Booster do much the same thing.

I had my partner check with some Japanese song this morning and he thinks without eqMac it’s just slightly muffled in the voice, but nicer with eqMac.

As mentioned, I’m having an issue with eqMac and Facetime, but the developer is looking at it on Discord.

Somebody mentioned this might be due to loss of high frequency sensitivity with aging. Not impossible. I am 65 now. And I can’t really hear high pitch alerts on my Watch, so I set it to haptic. Still… the songs and voices on videos all sound find on my iPad Pro. So I tend to think it’s the speaker’s fault.

What I’m really curious is whether my MBP is an outlier, or if that’s just the way they are. I’m going to try (if my dog lets me) to go over to an electronics store today and see if I can hear a store model.