Help with generating EQ curve

Hi all,

I’m completely new to this stuff, so I hope you bear with me. I recently installed Linux alongside Windows 10 and found the audio quality in Linux is terrible. From searching around, I gather that my computer, which shipped with Windows 10, has optimized the sound already. This optimization doesn’t extend into Linux, so I was told to use an equalizer to tweak the audio in Linux.

I played around with the sliders in EasyEffects for awhile and got nowhere because I was essentially moving them at random. So, I tried to be more methodical by doing the following:

  1. Play a song in Windows 10 and use Audacity to record the speakers output.
  2. Play the exact same song in Linux and record the speakers output again.
  3. Use Audacity’s Plot Spectrum function to generate intensity (dB) v. frequency (Hz) data for each recording.
  4. For each recording, divide all intensities by the highest intensity such that the highest dB value is 1 - this corrects for any differences in volume between the recordings.
  5. For each frequency, find the difference in intensity between the Windows recording and the Linux recording. This will then tell me how much to change the intensity at each frequency in Linux so the sound matches the sound in Windows.

I’m running into a big problem in that the Plot Spectrum function in Audacity is generating different frequencies for each recording. For the Windows recording, the data has 0.336456 to 22049.663544 Hz, whereas the Linux recording has 0.366211 to 23999.633789 Hz. Both data sets have 65535 points. Is there a way to force the function to list intensities at specific frequencies?

I’d also appreciate any advice concerning my problem in general (making the Linux audio match the Windows audio). Like I said, I’m very unversed in this stuff. Thanks in advance!