Apps That Eke Better Sound From Old Earphones People are forever buying new headphones in an attempt to eke a little more enjoyment out of music on pads, pods and phones. It can be an expensive habit. But maybe you don't need to toss the old headphones just yet. There are some apps that let you tailor the sound to your tastes. They vary in price and effectiveness, so I tried out several on an iPod and iPad, listening with Grado SR 80 headphones and a pair of standard Apple earbuds. The results seems to show that you get what you pay for, although there is a big exception - but I'll get to that. One app that is free is Headquake from Sonic Emotion. It lets you set "Position" and "Ambience." Even with those in the off position, the app pumps a load of bass through. Moving the position slider to the right makes it sound as if there is more separation between channels, but also has a bit of a muffling effect on the vocals. The ambiance slider emphasizes the vocals and sound in that range and adds a slight echo. Bongiovi DPS has a free version, but using my better headphones I heard only marginal improvement over the standard playback on the iPhone. You get many more settings with the $2.99 version. But those pretuned settings are named for cities, so good luck figuring out how Annapolis is intended to sound versus Toledo. A much more effective feature is the volume control, which makes all of the songs play back at about the same volume level regardless of the level at which they were recorded. It worked far better than iTunes's "sound check," which is supposed to do the same thing. SRS makes an array of apps for the Apple iOS devices, as well as a piece of hardware that will let any device with a 3.5mm jack sweeten its sound. The main products are MyTunes Pro for the iPhone ($6.99) and iTouch and MyTunes Pro HD for the iPad ($9.99). It was the most convincing and useful of the effects I tried. The two versions of MyTunes are essentially the same. The screens are slightly different, but they share features, so if you want to save a few dollars and don't care about the look of the app, you can run the cheaper iPhone version on your iPad. It will sound the same. The SRS apps allowed the most customization. It has a single dial for the "SRS Wow" setting, which increases the amount of detail you can hear in songs. Toggling the feature on and off over a number of songs increases the apparent spread between the speakers, and pumps up instruments a bit, while making the vocals sound a little less prominent. You can also set equalization using simple high, mid and low dials, or you can try the 10-band equalizer, which lets you adjust more specific frequencies. It also has equalizer presets for many music genres, like rock, classical and techno. It also has an "auto volume" feature that puts all of your music at the same volume level just like the similar feature on the Bongiovi DPS app. Not everybody has a music player whose name starts with a lower case "i." For those who don't, SRS has piece of hardware called iWow Universal which plugs into a 3.5mm headphone jack. It is a mini-digital-to-analog converter that sweetens sound for more than just music. It can also work with games or video. There are two versions of the iWow, the iWow 3D ($80) for Apple devices, which has an associated app, and the iWow Universal for other devices, which has no app. That means you can't customize the sound the way you can on an Apple product, but there are a variety of preset adjustments built in, so you have some options. There is an odd phenomenon that is a balm to skinflints like me. The cheapest headphones get about as much benefit out of the free apps as the paid apps. Since the apps are designed to improve the sound of inadequate headphones (I'm looking at you, Apple earbuds) it is also what they work well with. There is yet another adjustment sound that is free and works well, but it can be time consuming. You can custom set an equalizer and volume for each song in an iTunes library. Here's how: Click on the song you want to adjust so that it is highlighted. Then open the file menu along the top of the screen, and click on "get info." A window will open with a bar along the top. From the bar click on "options." From this screen you can set a custom volume level, or click on "equalizer preset" and choose options like "bass booster" "classical" or "dance." The settings will apply to that song only. Next time you save to your portable player those equalizer settings will go with it.