THX Tune Up is an iOS app for the iPhone 4 and higher, iPod touch fourth generation and higher and iPad 2 and higher that is worth downloading if you want to effortlessly control the audio and video quality of your home theater home system. It costs $1.99 on the iTunes App Store and essentially allows you to adjust your picture when you are watching TV.
Sandra Benedetto, who is the Director of Product Management at THX explains that the app is designed for average users and is not meant to provide professional calibration but to simply learn a little about how to adjust your picture to get the best results. To that end, you should be aware that you will not get a full home theater type of calibration as you are simply using an app and do not have additional tools to go along with it.
The THX Tune Up app provides you with a combination of patterns for testing the quality of your picture when watching TV. There are a variety of areas that can be tweaked with it, including contrast, color, tint, brightness and aspect ratio. There are still images of objects and people that you can use while testing these functions. The images come courtesy of THX’s product certification team and are meant to provide users with their desired results. It is convenient and doesn’t require the use of a colored gel or glasses to examine patterns from a disc provided for testing. Instead, the app uses the camera of your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to test the patterns of color that will appear on your TV.
There are also two audio tests present within the app that check for the position of speakers and the polarity of your speakers for an ancillary sound system that include anywhere from two to 5.1 speakers. In addition, there are more great features, such as movie trailers, a butting that turns your device into a virtual cow as it moos when you tilt it up or down.
Your device needs a connection with your audio receiver or display to be able to check for audio tests or to feed the HDTV with the patterns you want. This means you should have an HDMI adapter for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad so that it can provide the best image quality. You can also connect wirelessly using an Apple TV media server.