Again, I like the effect and used it when the iPad was connected to small speakers and cheap headphones. It also greatly improved the sound of the iPad’s speaker—that speaker sounded puny without it. Even with better components it can sound quite good provided you don’t dial up the effect too much. Dialed up toward the extreme end with these components I found the high frequencies and unnatural separation grating.

The app offers three other enhancements—EQ, Auto-volume, and Speed. EQ is what you’d expect—a 3- or 10-band equalizer for accentuating or diminishing particular audio frequencies. Tap the Presets button in this pane to select from several EQ settings including Loudness, Treble Boost, Rock, Classical, Vocal, and Live.

Auto-volume, like iTunes’ Sound Check feature, attempts to automatically adjust your iPad’s audio tracks so that all tracks play back at a similar volume. I found it to be effective.

And the Speed enhancement is largely intended for podcast and audiobook tracks. It allows you to force tracks to play back faster or slower without affecting the track’s pitch, thus allowing you to dash through these recordings yet still understand what’s being said. It’s not a great effect to use with music if you adjust it more than a couple of percentage points either way—you’ll definitely hear artifacts. (However, even with the artifacts, it’s not a bad tool for musicians who want to slow down a raging guitar solo to help learn just how it was put together.)