For what we are going to tell you below to work, you just need to have the Windows 10 or 11 operating system on your PC, and of course you must have an audio output connected, which can be speakers , a soundbar, headphones, or even the monitor’s built-in speakers, if you have them. It doesn’t matter if what you have connected is analog (3.5mm mini-jack) or digital (optical S/PDIF or USB), the trick will work the same way.
It’s so easy to improve sound quality in Windows
The first thing you have to do is go to Windows settings, and for this you have to left-click on the Start button and select Settings (the gear icon). You can also right-click Start and directly select Settings. In the window that opens, you need to click on “System” on the left side and then select Sound on the right.
As we indicated in the screenshot above, you must then select “All audio devices” at the bottom, in the Advanced options section. A list will appear with all the audio outputs you have on the PC, and there you have to click on the one you want to improve (it can be speakers, headphones, etc., but the fact is that it cannot be do that on one device at a time, so if you want to improve the sound of headphones and speakers, you’ll have to do the process twice, once for each device).
On the next screen, a series of options for your audio device will appear. In the lower area, you will see that there is an option called “Enhance audio”, and this is the one you need to check to activate it.
This option that we have now enabled is compatible with any PC sound card, including built-in ones, and can help you improve sound quality automatically by allowing additional signal processing with the audio device, although it is true that in some cases it can cause problems (if so, note that even the operating system itself tells you to disable it if you are having sound problems).
On some PCs, and in this case only with Windows 11 (meaning this second part of the article won’t be available to everyone, but it’s worth taking a look if you have Windows 11 to see if your PC supports it), you can make additional settings for these audio enhancements. To do this, on the screen where we were before (where you activated the Enhance Audio option), notice that there is a button that says Advanced in blue: you must click on it to open the advanced properties of the audio device you are configuring.
A new window will open, and you will have to go to the “Improvements” tab (if this tab does not appear, your sound card is not compatible with it). Likewise, the improvements that may appear also depend on the device: in some cases up to 6 options will appear, but in integrated sound cards it is normal for the three options that we show you below to appear.
Here you can simply “play” with the settings, activating them at the top and configuring them with the “Settings” button a little lower. Each of these enhancements has its own description, such as Low Frequency Protection, which is described as “Low Frequency Protection suppresses frequencies below a specified limit to reduce audio distortion”. Obviously in this case, in the Configuration button, we can mark the frequency threshold in which we want this improvement to work.
You see, with these tricks, you will not only be able to improve the sound of your PC, but also establish another level of customization in the audio of your audio devices, and without having to spend money on buying new devices.