this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Apple
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I would love to jump on that bandwagon, but they sound so fucking awful. I’ll pick my Audio-Technica gear with the awkward Bluetooth every time; not that I use the Bluetooth while listening to music but it sure would be nice to have something on Apple’s level of wireless for meetings and audio quality in one package.
I had AirPod Max from 2020 forward and I have several pairs for Family. What I’ve found is that any replacement ear cushions that are sold on the market degrade sound quality considerably, active noise cancellation is also degraded, so you must be careful what type of modifications are done. In addition, Apple’s ear cushions bleed, sound, so there are Silicon covers that you can get that make a better seal around your ear, and the sound to me is identical to the AirPods Pro Gen 2 USB-C.
By the way, I can hear in both the AirPods Pro and the AirPods Max, the two stage of noise cancellation, the first stage, and then the sampling and the second stage of noise cancellation. The H1 chip processes this slower than the H2 chip however.
iFixIt group said the upgrade to USB-C for AirPods Max have a slight change to the amount of adhesive used around the components within the earcup, some of this may be due to prevention of any type of condensation, which may or may have never caused an issue in the past. They also noted that there was a different type of adhesive used to seal the speaker.
I think I’m talking about the speakers and codecs themselves. I always try them in the Apple Store with high hopes but the audio is blatantly compressed: it sounds “tinny” while lows and mids come out poorly reproduced.
I know that with Bluetooth there is limited bandwidth, so even with high quality source files it’s always going to be (re-)encoded with AAC. Apple ditched aptX which is a shame, because at least the quality was much higher than AAC.
I use an AudioQuest DragonFly while listening to music, and it’s clunky for sure but I don’t want to be forced to use Bluetooth and compression.