Global Delight Sponsoring TidBITS

We’re pleased to welcome our latest TidBITS sponsor, Global Delight, an Indian company that has been producing Mac utilities for over a decade now. Global Delight’s flagship app is the audio enhancement utility Boom 3D, which provides 3D surround sound using any headphones, from any player, and with any media or streaming service. (There are also mobile versions for iOS and Android, but they can apply the sound enhancement only to audio played through the app.)

Apple has been making a lot of noise over its addition of lossless audio and spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, but those features are limited to select songs available only to Apple Music subscribers. Boom 3D applies its patented 3D Surround effect to all system audio, so it works not just with the Music app but also with YouTube playing in a Web browser, movies in the TV app, and more. You can even control the simulated individual speakers, which isn’t all that useful but shows just what 3D Surround is actually doing.

I can’t pretend to have anything approaching golden ears, but I do prefer 3D Surround’s audio when played through my AirPods Pro or Altec Lansing speakers. When I played a Dolby Atmos track from Apple Music, Boom 3D seemed to give even it a little more depth and spatial oomph. But don’t take my word for it—Global Delight offers a 30-day free trial.

Boom 3D offers other audio effects that tweak how you experience audio. You’ll have to see if you like what they do, but two struck me as worth trying for particular uses. Fidelity promises to improve detail, crispness, and clarity, which might help make a muddy voice recording easier to understand. Night Mode normalizes audio to reduce the volume of loud sounds and increase the volume of faint sounds—perhaps ideal for action movies with both explosions and muttered dialog.

Other features include an audio player that lets you play audio files directly, access to 20,000 Internet radio stations, app-specific volume controls, a 31-band equalizer with numerous presets, and keyboard shortcuts (scroll down in the Settings screen to find them). Boom 3D regularly costs $39.99 but is currently on sale for 70% off, dropping the price to $12. There’s also a Windows 10 version, should you want to enhance audio on a PC as well.

Thanks to Global Delight for sponsoring TidBITS!