My Jabra headphones don't seem to apply any processing by default, and I prefer how they sound with the processing. If your headphones already boost bass or apply another effect, stacking the processing can be grating (which I've experienced when I record a video and play that through the daemon running).
I guess it's a matter of taste. I just like music sounding as though it's coming from a little farther away, and I suppose the bass-boost might be what you're finding unpleasant.
I think it is meant to make jazz sound good. The eq-d bass and attenuated mids make a standup bass more apparent and the piano and vocals more present.
But it made me start to wonder if I started hating my favorite band: I was packing up to move this weekend and stumbled on my CD collection. Many Stereolab CDs. I played them in my basic acoustic waveguide radio. A slick bookshelf I inherited and rarely use.
45 minutes later I was telling myself "god this music sucks...just agonizing repetition." Turns out yes the motorik bass is repetitive...but the other key point of the band is the gentle singing and intricate delicate synth and organ melodies...all foreclosed on by some evil twin combo of an audio eng and marketer overindexing in mid low bass.
OP wants the `earwax` audio filter in ffmpeg.
To get the best possible results from equalization you need to do it by ear by comparison to a calibrated reference loudspeaker, but you can still get good results using other people's measurements. And there's no consensus what the best target curve is. Studio control rooms aren't anechoic chambers so "flat" won't necessarily give you the intended sound. You might find AutoEq useful:
I generally prefer no spatial processing, except in the case of 60s-style hard-panned stereo, which is intended for loudspeakers and does sound a lot better with the "earwax" filter or similar. "Precise and neutral" is a lot more difficult with loudspeakers, both because it's hard to keep distortion low when you're moving a lot of air, and because you have the off-axis response and room acoustics complicating things.
It sounds very close to what I was going for, and feels much softer to hear. I wasn't able to find anything similar earlier with any search engine or an LLM.
I would have liked to compare the audio clip from the beginning of the article, at the end too! Instead I had to record my own voice. And there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle the effect on and off? So it's a bit hard to get a sense of what it actually does.
This also reminds me of this cool mp3 from the 2000s — maybe it's on YouTube these days — called virtual barbershop, which was recorded with binaural microphones.
Edit: here she is! https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
And there is a way to toggle it: the icon which is orange can be tapped on and off, and you can adjust the "bass" which is built in with the ring around it. Also, it's likely to have no effect on voice, more complex arrangements will have an audible difference.
There is similarly an example on Wikipedia too, which got me interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BinauralPaper.ogg.
I've made the default 20% in the page for now.