Your iPhone can produce much better audio than you might realise.

Whether you listen through AirPods, wired headphones, Bluetooth speakers or the iPhone’s built-in speakers, several settings can noticeably change how your music sounds.

And some of the biggest improvements take less than a minute.

Here are the best ways to improve audio quality on an iPhone, including the settings worth changing in Apple Music and Spotify, how to use lossless audio properly and a few features hidden inside iOS.

1. Increase the streaming quality first

Before changing EQ settings or buying new headphones, make sure the music being sent to your headphones is actually high quality.

Streaming services can automatically reduce audio quality to save mobile data or prevent buffering.

Apple Music

Go to:

Settings > Apps > Music > Audio Quality

From here you can independently control the quality used for:

  • Mobile data streaming
  • Wi-Fi streaming
  • Downloads

Apple Music also allows you to enable Lossless Audio.

Apple’s lossless catalogue uses its ALAC format and ranges from CD-quality 16-bit/44.1kHz up to Hi-Res Lossless at 24-bit/192kHz.

For most listeners, however, simply making sure high-quality streaming is enabled will be enough.

Spotify

Spotify users can find similar controls by opening:

Spotify > Profile picture > Settings and privacy > Media quality

Spotify Free currently offers quality up to approximately 160kbps on mobile, while Spotify Premium offers Very High quality at approximately 320kbps as well as Lossless audio at up to 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC.

If you’re on Premium and have plenty of data available, Very High should be the minimum setting I’d choose for everyday listening.

Lossless is worth experimenting with if your audio equipment can actually take advantage of it.

2. Don’t assume AirPods give you lossless Apple Music

This is probably the biggest misunderstanding surrounding iPhone audio.

Turning on Lossless in Apple Music doesn’t automatically mean you are hearing lossless audio.

Most AirPods connect to an iPhone using Bluetooth, and Apple states that Bluetooth connections aren’t lossless.

That means you can have:

Apple Music Lossless → iPhone → Bluetooth → AirPods

…but the final Bluetooth connection prevents the entire signal chain from remaining lossless.

This doesn’t mean AirPods sound bad.

AAC over modern Apple devices can sound extremely good, and many listeners may struggle to hear a meaningful difference between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio.

But if your goal is technically lossless playback, you’ll generally want a wired connection.

3. Try wired headphones for the biggest quality upgrade

If audio quality matters more to you than convenience, one of the simplest upgrades is going back to wired headphones.

Modern iPhones can output extremely high-quality digital audio through USB-C.

Connect a good pair of wired headphones through a suitable adapter or DAC and you’ll bypass Bluetooth compression entirely.

Apple Music supports Lossless up to 24-bit/48kHz without requiring Hi-Res equipment, while listening above 48kHz requires an external digital-to-analogue converter, or DAC.

For serious listening, the chain might look like:

iPhone → USB-C DAC → wired headphones

This is where switching Apple Music to Lossless becomes much more worthwhile.

4. Experiment with the iPhone EQ

A technically higher-quality audio file isn’t necessarily the same thing as audio that sounds better to you.

Equalisation can sometimes make a far bigger subjective difference.

For Apple Music, go to:

Settings > Apps > Music > EQ

You’ll see presets designed to alter different parts of the frequency spectrum.

Try a few while listening to a song you know extremely well.

Depending on your headphones and musical preferences, you may prefer settings that emphasise bass, vocals or higher frequencies.

There isn’t one universally “best” iPhone EQ setting.

The best setting is the one that works with your headphones and your ears.

Apple confirms that Music’s EQ controls are available directly under the Music settings in iOS.

Spotify offers even more control because its equaliser allows you to manually change frequency bands rather than relying entirely on presets.

5. Try turning Sound Check on — and off

Another Apple Music setting worth testing is Sound Check.

You’ll find it at:

Settings > Apps > Music > Sound Check

Sound Check attempts to normalise volume between different songs.

That’s useful because masters can vary significantly in loudness. Without