One of the things that those us who grew up on Winamp had the luxury using every time we launched the application was the equalizer.

This was quickly one of those things that was easy to take for granted because as soon as you launched another audio player, you’d either find something that was subpar or you’d find nothing at all.

These days, as much as I love working on a Mac, it’s still hard to believe that one of the largest pieces of audio software on the planet – iTunes – doesn’t ship with an equalizer.

I don’t know why this is – perhaps it’s because it’s built into “everything just works” ethos, but for those who care about squeezing every bit of sound quality out of their speakers knows, the sound works but it’s not as nice as it could be.

Enter Boom2.

What is Boom2?

In short, Boom2 is the equalizer that OS X should have had all along.

Boom2

Boom2 is a small application that, once installed, takes a profile of your system and then provides what it believes to be the best audio settings for you. Above, you can see the profile it generated for my MacBook Air.

The thing is, we also listen to different types of music – sometimes its soundtracks, some times it’s rock, sometimes it’s ambient, sometimes it’s something completely different. Whatever the case, Boom2 not only has built-in presets for other types of music, but it allows you to create your own profiles to use however you see fit.

This has been especially handy not only in the case when I’m listening to different types of music and I want to highlight certain aspects of it, but also in the case when I’m switching between the laptop’s speakers, my external speakers, and my headphones.

Finally, the app offers a one week free trial such that you can use it completely unrestricted for seven days after which you have to pay to continue using it.

After about two days of using it all day long, I was ready to pay for it. It’s well worth the $15.