Boom 3D
Make your Mac sound better
£12.99 FROM Global Delight Technologies, globaldelight.com NEEDS OS X 10.10.3 or later
There’s a problem with ever-thinner Macs: thin cases mean thin speakers, which means thin sound. It’s particularly noticeable on the iMac, on which music sounds as if it is being shouted at you by somebody in a bucket, but it’s a problem on MacBooks too. Boom 3D can help though.
The app changes the sound of your Mac to make it brighter, wider – and on headphones, to give you virtual surround sound. It works: turn it off and the sound is considerably duller and less interesting. At heart it’s an equaliser with some extra effects to add ‘air’ at the top end, widen the stereo image, and so on, but it’s packaged in a way that people who aren’t audio experts can understand easily enough.
It’s particularly good on headphones, with wider stereo, better bass, and more pronounced separation of individual sounds such as gunshots and vehicles. It’s easy to overcook the sound – crank up the sliders and the sibilantsssss sssssound like ssssssnakesss – but if you take a ‘less is more’ approach it’s very effective. It’s no substitute for good quality speakers, of course, but it’s a big improvement on the default options.