What is the best iTunes Equalizer settings for Bose QC15 Headphones?

Question

What is the best iTunes Equalizer settings for the Bose QC15 Headphones? An image of those settings would be great.

Answer 1

I'm a bit of an audio geek, so I can tell you that YES whatever sounds right is what you want, but NO those settings are not very good. The general setting is "OK" but the values are extremely out of range. Take that setting and reduce the distance between the sliders and you're getting there. Look for example at how the other iTunes presets are made, the don't go that far from the horizontal middle, and for good reason.
When you play a recorded song, the song has usually been put through an extensive process of mixing, EQ and mastering before you got it, in order to get the best balance of all frequencies, to ensure the best sound accross a wide range of speakers and headphones, and to ensure the most important details and instruments are audible when played together.
All speakers are different, and that's where the idea of an EQ for the listener is introduced. The idea is to tweak the overall sound from your music player (iTunes) to compensate for the strengths and weaknesses of your speakers. Which to be honest, is a bit much to expect form a typical music consumer.
The iTunes EQ has a set of horizontal lines representing 3dB (volume steps) each. In my experience you should not boost or cut more than 6 db at the most - and that's a lot! I stay at around 0-4dB. The extreme options are there to cut noise from bad recordings or emphasize a detail you can't hear very well.
So here's basic EQ lesson:
The EQ represents the range frequencies in sound that the human ear can hear. Actually they go beyond that - most people cannot hear the far left and right frequencies. The range of frequencis start at "deep" or "low" frequencies at the left (bass) passing through the Midrange (midtones) in the center, to the (treble) at the right.
Your speaker has a limit to how many frequencies it can play at once before it starts to lose detail - meaning one sound will drown out in order to make room for another. So don't over-EQ your sound or it'll ruin it.
How to tweak an EQ:
1) Start by playing a well-produced piece of modern music  - it'll most likely be well mixed and employ a wide range of frequencies. I'm into heavy metal but for this I'd probably go with some average pop music, because metal is so noisy it gets hard to pick out the details.
2) Set you EQ to FLAT - zero all accross the board. It'll sound pretty flat and boring unless your speakers are very "flavoured" or "colored" already.
Sliding any of the EQ bar up, will increase or boost the volume of the frequency the bar represents. You can't really add frequencies that aren't there already - you're just adding noise in that freqeuncy and that will "fill up" the available frequencies on your speaker, causing that "drowned out" effect I was talking about.
Instead, slide them down from the center, and you're cutting the volume instead. This is better because it'll leave more "room" for the other frequencies. You can always use the Preamp slider at the end if you're worried about loudness (but I wouldn't).
3) Start by tweaking the 500 and 1K slider. This represents the middle of your ears' range of hearing and the most noticable change. It should most likely go downwards - this will take the "canned" sound out of your music and that'll be apparent quickly. Go ahead and slide that down as far as -6dB.
4) Now work outwards from the center forming a "v" shape, where the top tips of the V end at the 64 slider and the 8k slider. The very far left and right sliders (32 and 16K) should dip down again to about 0bB. Trust me, these are almost non-important in most music. You can tweak thos last if you feel it's needed.
5) now it's time to start playing round with the V shape. Go ahead and try sliding the sliders a little up or down between 125-250 and 1K to 4K. You may find that some need to move a lot out of the average "V" shape before the sound is good. This is what my iTunes EQ settings ended up looking like for my Motörheadphones "Motorizer" headphones:
Hope it helps.