Your iPhone sounds decent out of the box, but some tweaks can drastically improve what you hear. Whether you're playing sound straight from the device's speaker or through headphones, you'll want the audio to be as clean as possible. The Settings app (and individual app settings) offer a smorgasbord of options for improving audio quality, from noise cancellation to equalizers and lossless audio.

Major streaming apps have settings that adjust the audio quality delivered to your device. For Apple Music, go to Settings > Apps > Music, then tap Audio Quality and choose your settings. Spotify offers the same setting under your profile picture at Settings and privacy > Media quality. After enabling high-quality streaming, take a look at your equalization (EQ) settings. For Apple Music, you'll find these under the same Settings > Apps > Music menu. For Spotify, you'll find these options by tapping your profile icon, choosing Settings and privacy and selecting Playback.

The Lossless option deserves special attention. Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscribers can take advantage of lossless audio, which preserves all the audio's original data, producing a crisp sound equivalent to CD quality. Note that this will use much more data and storage space. Unfortunately, having the best AirPods won't help you here, as Bluetooth doesn't support lossless. To get the best audio, you'll need one of the best DACs for Apple Music, like the budget-friendly FiiO KA11.