macOS Sequoia expands the Headphone Accommodations feature for AirPods and Beats products from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac.
Mac owners can now customize how their AirPods or compatible Beats headphones sound by optimizing the sound for specific scenarios, adjusting the level of amplification, importing audiograms to personalize audio to their liking, etc.
Surfaced in the second developer beta of macOS Sequoia, this feature will be available to all users when Apple publicly releases macOS Sequoia in the fall.
macOS Sequoia brings the Headphone Accommodations settings to the Mac
When macOS Sequoia is released and you install the update, a new Headphone Accommodations section will pop up in System Settings > Accessibility > Audio. On iOS and iPadOS 18, venture into Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Headphone Accommodations.
After switching on Headphone Accommodations at the top, you can tune your AirPods Pro or Beats audio for balanced tone, vocal range or brightness. The Balanced Tone setting provides “a boost over a range of frequencies,” Apple says.
Enhancing AirPods audio via Headphone Accommodations
Underneath the Optimization heading is a slider for changing whether Apple’s computational audio algorithm boosts soft sounds slightly, moderately or strongly. then, set whether these settings will be applied to phone calls and/or media like music and videos below Apple With.
You can even customize Transparency Mode on your AirPods Pro in the Headphone Accommodations section by dragging sliders next to Amplification, Balance, Tone and Ambient Noise Reduction, as well as choose whether the Conversation Boost feature will be enabled when Transparency Mode is on.
How to import an audiogram on a Mac
To import your audiogram from the Health app, click the Custom Audio Setup button. You can create an audiogram on your iPhone with iOS 17.4 and later.
An audiogram maps your headphones to your personal hearing profile to precisely tune the audio performance to your liking. This feature is especially handy for people who can only hear higher or lower frequencies.