If you had to bet on Apple supporting APTX Lossless or inventing their own thing that won’t work with other peoples stuff, you already know what they’re going to do.
Well, AptX is shit (non-lossless), the only okay codec in use is LDAC, and it's by brute force - 990kbps is awfully close to flac typical bitrate (you'll also get connectivity issues for obvious reasons). Also legal reasons - everyone wants $$$$ for their shit codec
I don't know why the whole ecosystem is so fucked up, even AAC ~256kbps can pass double blind test against lossless source, assuming properly encoded and decoded - this assumption is not fulfilled in a slightest in Bluetooth land.
P.S. I really want to see some good and open codec, like .opus, properly implemented - this will close major source of frustration for everyone involved and will drive whole industry forward
I feel like the real improvement in aptx is not the audio quality, but the latency for keeping audio and video in sync when watching tv (or computers for that matter). I used to work in the bluetooth chip industry and there really were very few players who were competitive in the audio headset business. I don't have any real insight into the players these days, but I would be very surprised if there were more than 4 chip makers who were competitive in that space. CSR was the dominant player for audio, so it's not surprising that Qualcomm who bought CSR offers this proprietary solution. So I think it's going to be really hard for someone to make an open codec solution that competes in terms of size, battery life, cost with an IC that's targeted to the market.
There's also LHDC/HWA from Huawei/Savitech(?) for the two headphones that support it. It's approved by the Hi-Res society or whatever like LDAC.
Good luck finding a system that can play back LHDC though. At least thr LDAC encoder is free (to my knwoledge) and Android and PipeWire have support for it. LHDC, you'd better get the one of three phones that support it (from Huawei, Xiaomi, maybe OnePlus I think). I mean, Savitech has their forked fluoride Bluetooth stack + aarch64 LHDC binary blob and wrapper library source code on GitLab but I guess you'd have to hack something together to try it.
What is the latency for something like AAC? How much power does it take to encode and decode?
It seems to me like some of the big constraints on codec choice are power, latency and then quality. Maybe “spectral efficiency” too, but I don’t really know.
Could be why they are using a high rate lossless codec? Maybe said codec is super efficient to encode on a tiny airpod with a tiny power source?
I guess what I’m saying is maybe there are additional constraints specific to this problem domain that aren't a concern for the rest of us?
That doesn’t mean it can’t be an unencumbered, open source codec though. It just might mean the “common” ones out there don’t fit the constraints of the system.
No idea how it supposed to work in theory, in practice every device combo i tried works noticably worse with AptX (than LDAC, even non-990 one). Don't have any device capable of AptX lossless.
Re: solve - as long as there are licensing issues, it can't solve BT Audio even if it was such great codec
P.S. Random link from google with measurements of some actual device using AptX, AAC, LDAC
Aptx is actually pretty good, certainly for ear pods. It's a time-domain codec which is great for acoustical instruments (the frequency-domain codecs can fail there, AAC too).
The signal-to-noise ratio is lower than CD quality but still good enough so that noise is not audible:
I'm not sure compatibility with other people stuff is something that apple would concern itself about, I think that might be true for anyone else, but apple supporting only apple ecosystem the best way it can, I think according to its history, is the preferred way, and I think next iteration might be like that, first they had to show what potential apple sound would be like, once people know its top of the top, they can restrict it to apple only, personally I've known a lot of apple users, and people with an iPhone or a mac, have also an iPhone, a Mac, and an iPad, and AirPods
Have you bought airpods without iphone? You can't even see the battery level reliably without third party apps, which don't even consistently work? I'm an android user and had them for a couple of weeks, before returning them, they're already part of a closed ecosystem
It isn't, but there are reverse-engineered encoders and decoders, at least, in the form of libopenaptx and libfreeaptx. This is what PipeWire on Linux uses to play aptX audio (specifically it uses libfreeaptx).
I'm by no means an Apple fan, but AAC on Android is worse due to using SOC-builtin encoders a lot of the time (sometimes they use the Fraunhofer AAC encoder, which sounds better). Apple's AAC encoder is unparalleled and the difference is 100% tangible, so the listening experience will be better on iOS, followed by whatever uses the Fraunhofer encoder (PipeWire on Linux is pretty damn solid in AAC Bluetooth for this reason, but not as good).
I'm using them, both with my Android phone and on my Win laptop. I experienced two issues tho.
First one was that you can't see a charge percent by default, but I managed to fix it by installing an app from Play Store. Second one is that sometimes, when they connect to my phone, volume somehow glitches, so even if it's on the half the strength, you can barely hear them.
Anyone who ever wanted to listen to music while waiting for a video call to start with airpods on knows that bluetooth is holding any wireless headphones back.
I wake up and run early each day. Used to use wired headphones but decided in 2021 to try earbuds (not apple). Most mornings only one will pair so there I am unpairing and repairing several times before I run, I'm generally a calm person but have come quite close to rage destroying phone and airbuds in response. Bluetooth and I are not friends.
I got the AirPods a few weeks ago. I'm still amazed that Apple managed to make me hate bluetooth less than I did previously (coming from a Samsung phone + Galaxy Buds). They really managed to make the everyday bluetooth experience seamless. However, whenever I did encounter those rare issues, troubleshooting AirPods was infinitely more cumbersome than with 'regular' bt headphones.
Airpods are great the only thing I hate is Apple syncs bluetooth settings to all devices using the same iCloud account with seemingly no way to disable it.
I never use my airpods max with my iPhone. Likewise I never use my regular airpods with my macbook. But whenever I put them on, no matter what options I check like "pair with last device", it pairs with the wrong device. I have removed the airpods max from my iPhone but Apple will just add it back.
Things like this are why I don't want to use apple's account services at all.
My no-name Amazon earpods knock offs work just fine, every time, for running. Not sure what fancy features they lack, but they "just work", better than my Bose QC35.
I bought an Apple Watch and Powerbeats Pro headphones just for my morning walks/runs. When it works, it works like a charm and gives me the perfect start to the day. Bluetooth and I are best friends on those days!
But once every two weeks or so, the phones (or at least one of them) decide they aren't having any of it and just refuse to pair, and I have to spend the whole morning trying to figure out what went wrong. Bluetooth and I are blood enemies on those days!
I swear. But it's not just an issue with the cheap, knockoff stuff: my Bose Soundsport Earbuds often fail, too, with the left one connecting maybe two thirds of the time. It's so infuriating. The only upside is that they were a gift rather than a purchase, so at least I don't have to suffer through the fact that I paid for this crap.
Yeah, pretty much. The Internet was full of people telling us why fully wireless ear buds were impossible until overnight suddenly Apple made them possible for almost everyone.
Not OP, but a huge percentage of the no-name wireless earbuds I see are airpod knockoffs. Also, there were no successful true wireless earbuds before AirPods, just a couple of ones that launched a few months earlier to poor reviews.
The earpiece craze started long before. I remember my mono-audio Samsung earpiece that went into one ear and worked perfectly from a decade before Airpods. The samsung charged with a simple USB cable, too.
What is the unique feature of an Airpod that was not present in the successful products that launched a decade before? Status symbol for the apple nuts?
Most people I know use only one airpod at a time. That applies to my two teens in highschool and a multitude of professionals I work with. The same people a decade earlier would just be using the Samsung mono ear pieces or the multitude of other ones that existed.
Airpod has 3 bluetooth chips, one in each ear and the case. All of these are synced, and the individual ear pieces are synced. Their form factor, battery life, ease of pairing, sound quality, build quality, comfort, and price point were what made them better than anything else on the market. Competitors may have caught up but Apple is still offering the best product.
I own airpods because they came free with a macbook I was buying as a gift for someone. I use them.
They are a bit of an improvement over some devices out there, but they are probably a downgrade from Bose bluetooth devices I have owned temporarily (I returned them to exchange for a wired buds pair).
I think you are giving Apple too much credit. I would say Airpods have good marketing and it is smart to give them away for free with their other products to create or perpetuate an illusion of popularity.
I expect devices which go through constant charging/discharging to start noticeably degrading after 500 cycles, and to be very degraded by 1,000 cycles. Have consumer goods progressed beyond this yet?
No, they have not. Companies probably see no reason to innovate here either -- it is one of two major reasons for their customers to buy new devices.
(1) Battery is nearly useless.
(2) The vendor decided to artificially slow the device with forced updates, or worse, the vendor decided to publish a list of CVEs and then declare your device ineligible for the necessary security updates going forward.
Bluetooth works fine for high quality audio in cases where the hardware is good. My audio setup for on the go uses Bluetooth and its world's better than the audio quality from airpods
I think the problem that the parent is alluding to is a different one: AFAIR Bluetooth has a high quality profile without microphone support
for music and the like, and a low quality profile for headsets with microphone support. Waiting for a call obviously requires using the low quality profile since you intend to use the microphone. (Take this with a grain of salt, my memory on this is fuzzy and I’m not an expert in this matter)
Personally I never use headsets for calls, but I also never make calls. I only use headphones for music (and would never touch airpods with a 10 foot pole)
I’m an an ASR-type (sound science) audiophile, primarily headphones but have some decent home systems (buchardt A500 living room, kef lsx bedroom - dsp controlled, anechoalically flat measuring systems w/ lfe tuned to the spaces they’re in).
My earphone system when out and about are Shure KSE1200 tuned to Harman IE, electrostats that are easily the best in the world when PEQ’ed. I also use AirPods Pro in a pinch. They’re pretty good - even from an audiophile perspective for those who care about proper engineering - I’d give them an A for their tuning and a B for technicalities… which surely could be improved off Bluetooth. They are decently well reviewed AFA tuning on places like Rtings, Crinacle, and are well regarded for the type of device they are on Head-fi.
If you spent any time on ASR you’d know the vast majority of headphones have highly flawed FR, even the very high end. I’d prefer to listen to the lowly AirPods Pro, at least without hefty amounts of PEQ, over most headphones. Fwiw I found head-fi nearly 20 years ago, have been to several CanJams, have run my own meets, and probably owned over $50k in headphone rigs over the years... I know what what the 'best' sounds like.
Edit: shame about the downvote, but saying "wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole" is a kneejerk thing to say that has no basis in their actual performance or engineering.
I've read good things about the pro version, my comment was about the base version. In my opinion they sounded horribly tinny
I personally use a qudelix with Dan Clark aeon rt. For in ear I use tin audio p(1 or 2, can't remember off the top of my head) and from my experiences the original airpods can't even come close to the tin HiFi planar in ears (yes they do have their flaws, but tinny is not one of them)
Oh nice, that's a great budget setup for sure. Yeah my comments are only for the Pro... the originals were really just a wireless version of the free inears they used to include. The gen 3 Airpods are supposed to incorporate much of the tech of the pros in an open back format. The iso w/ dsp give the Pros pretty good LFE.
So you can make everyone else on the call suffer your horrible audio quality instead (room echo, etc.)? Probably not the smartest option when trying to get Management to get comfortable with work from home.
> So you can make everyone else on the call suffer your horrible audio quality instead (room echo, etc.)?
No you're confused - the point is it's better quality.
There's no limited bandwidth, and it's physically a larger microphone than the very limited micro one in your headset. It picks up the same background noise that its geometry can't eliminate, and can do the same processing to try to remove it.
Not only that, many laptops and tablets nowadays use microphone arrays, not just one - so get better quality from that. Also there's no time lag. Half the people dialing into meetings in airpods at my company have a very noticeable delay for their audio to come out when they start speaking. It's difficult to not accidentally interrupt them.
I’m not confused. I understand the concept of the wireless bandwidth that’s needed for the bidirectional communication when in headset mode vs headphone mode. My point is that the laptop microphone arrays are just not as good as a microphone that’s designed to be right next to your mouth, or at least within 6 inches. The mic arrays on laptops almost always sound worse than headsets.
> My point is that the laptop microphone arrays are just not as good as a microphone that’s designed to be right next to your mouth, or at least within 6 inches.
Those are tiny microphones in your headset, and there's only two of them, sending back a mono signal! A MacBook Pro has an array of three much larger, higher-quality microphones, with high SNR and directional beamforming and the ability to do proper noise cancellation. They're also on a hardware bus to your system. The microphones in a headset just don't compete.
All I can say is that when you’re on the other end of a call with someone using the laptop array, vs a headset, the quality of sound from the laptop array is objectively much worse than the headset. You hear room noise, echo, etc. It’s definitely not as bad as older laptop mics that didn’t have noise cancellation, etc. but it’s still worse than a headset.
Wouldn't the signal to noise ratio be better on earphones as they are relatively closer to your mouth and are "dampened" by your body as opposed to on a laptop where it's more likely to pick up keyboard/fan/environment noise as it's closer to those and has no/very little vibration dampening?
Better still get a <$50 USB microphone on Amazon that has a stand for it and use that. Enjoy everybody on video calls asking if you are some famous streamer.
I am not at home at the moment, so I don't know. The webcam is branded AngeTube and has a ring light. It was something like $50 at full price, but could be had new from Tradera (a swedish auction site) for as little as 200sek.
I also don't work in tech, so the video quality bar wasn't set very high by my colleagues.
Something allows a device to select what it connects with. I have a laptop, tablet and phone with me most of the time and managing the connection by disconnecting via the laptop/phone/tablet/car/whaever is silly - sometimes you have to kill bluetooth on two or three devices to get the device you want connected.
Something that has high quality audio in headset mode.
Something that makes data sharing easy. Having 500 different apps that must be the same on both ends of the connection so send a file or three is silly.
>Something allows a device to select what it connects with. I have a laptop, tablet and phone with me most of the time and managing the connection by disconnecting via the laptop/phone/tablet/car/whaever is silly - sometimes you have to kill bluetooth on two or three devices to get the device you want connected.
What's wrong with the current process? If turn on a bluetooth device (eg. bluetooth headphones) and it connects to a random one you don't want (eg. your tablet rather than your smartphone), then you can rectify that by going to your smartphone and connecting to that device. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's certainly less of a hassle than going around turning off all bluetooth devices in the vicinity, or trying to get device selection working on a bluetooth headphone (weird tap combinations? voice recognition?).
Have you ever tried Bluetooth File Transfer for anything substantial? It's snail speed in the real world. Nothing like AirDrop. It's almost unusable in 2021. A video would take minutes to transfer.
That's nice. It will be nicer when I can pair my phone with my laptop and move big files quickly. Long story short: faster bluetooth file transfer that I can't use is not useful to me.
> Apple's products do this well. Airpods can seamlessly switch between phone and computer.
The issue isn't just the headphones. It's the way bluetooth devices cannot manage what they connect to. A classic: I'm listening to music with headphones in my bedroom. My wife starts the car, and my phone automatically switches to the car. It's crazy, and the even the best headphones in the world (and maybe airpods are) can't fix this mess.
It's an interesting interview opening by throwing out the second half of the headline and the first half of the headline only being a footnote at the end.
It's obvious that Apple has been making moves to their own PAN solution for years (look at the unused UWB stuff).
I think it would be cool if HRTF options were exposed to the user. Most people don't care, but I would find it fun to play around with speaker positions and simulated room size.
They've been moving more in this direction without advertising it. If you're willing to dive into depths of the settings and shortcut apps you'll find there are lots of new things possible inside the walled garden.
It's the natural progression when there is a more open competitor: if you want to keep your walled garden relevant you need to keep the alternatives less alluring.
Look at Exposure Notifications. They basically make all the data available that they can, even though it’s unintelligible to average users. The experience only gets crummy when they open a web view to the relevant state-level health authority.
Do they make it easy to use multiple devices (one at a time) or to have one paired with each of two devices?
That's my only complaint with my £33 (vs. £109-£239 Apple AirPods) Anker 'Soundcore Life P2' wireless earbuds. Probably would pay a bit more for that to be easier, but not AirPods more, find it baffling how popular they are (or became/continue to be after the arrival of clones anyway) given the price.
When you put them in your ear they will connect to whatever has audio playing at the moment. It works as long as only one of the paired devices is in use at the same time.
The automatic switching is annoying when you use multiple devices simultaneously. Eg. when the kids are watching something on the iPad, and I put in my AirPods because I want to listen to some music on my phone, suddenly I hear audio from the iPad and my kids complain that the audio is gone.
(I've gone back to using wired headphones at home for this reason)
They make it easy to switch between multiple devices.
Then they make it harder to avoid switching between devices. For instance if you're on your laptop waiting for a call and want to check some link on your phone, if it ever happens to have audio in any way or form it will take the connection from your laptop, and you'll have to reswitch them when your call starts.
Same if you're listening to something on your iPad and a call comes on your phone . Your guess is as good as mine about how it will go.
In the end I bought separate headphones for each devices and while I had them the airpods only paired with my phone to avoid annoying surprises.
They largely make it effortless to use with multiple devices. Pair with one of your apple devices, and they’re automatically available on all of your other apple devices. For the most part, they even intelligently auto-switch between them as well.
Occasionally you will find an app on a device that claims to be playing audio when it’s not, and your AirPods get hijacked, but it’s easy enough to switch back and forth when that happens.
I bought a no-brand pair of wireless headphones in 2016 when I was on paternity leave with my first kid. Sure, they are not truly wireless, but I still get almost 6 hours of continuous use out of them.
I told my colleagues that got airpods that they will basically be a subscription. That was not the case, at least not they way I thought. They just bought new ones because replacing the battery at apple was too expensive.
The ability to just work whatever (Apple) device I’m currently using is the big selling point for AirPods to me. Typically I just put them in my ears and they connect to whatever device I’m currently using, worst case I have to select them like an Airplay target, or push a button on the remote if I want to use them with the TV.
Do they make it easy to use multiple devices (one at a time) or to have one paired with each of two devices?
If they're all Apple devices, yes. When I select AirPlay on my iPad, iPhones†, or AppleTV; or Sound on any of my Macs, all of my AirPods† show up and can be selected.
† Multiple iPhones and AirPods because I keep work and personal devices distinct.
I have a bud and an earphone from Anker and both straight forward work with multiple devices. The big issue is that AAC is only supported when connected to a single device and SBC is garbage.
You can pair them with multiple devices. Pick up the phone and play music and it'll switch from your iPad to your phone instantly. It's pretty good. You can also pair multiple sets (temporarily) to your iOS devices to share music for example.
I bought mine originally because I was getting fed up of the wires pulling me around when running. I went for AirPods only because I am paying for the integration, QA and ecosystem and I am more than satisfied with what I paid.
The other side of the coin is the people who perpetually drop out of voice conferences and make apologies at work who "refuse to drink the apple Kool aid".
Switching with non-Apple devices is also really easy.
Whenever I want to switch to my Windows laptop, I just click AirPods in the list and it connects instantly. Same when I want to switch back to an Apple device.
Try the Beats Fit Pro. I hated the open design of Air Pods. I’ve owned two different generations/models and both would always fall out my ears after a few minutes. In a month of use, the Fit Pro has only fell out once on me.
I have the Airpods pro with the smallest aftermarket ear tips and they never make a proper seal. Apple must think I have freakishly small ear canals. I have looked into custom molded ear tips, but they cost roughly the same as the Airpods! Over the ear headphones are pretty much the only solution for me, but that rules out exercising with them (can't wear a hat or helmet and they fall off when I am benching at the gym).
The Wireless+ system from AIAIAI is a significant improvement in this space. I've never had the need for a low-latency lossless audio signal but even nowadays bluetooth seems kind of clunky.
If you ask me it's the battery and the update process that is holding it back. I swore off of Apple earpods after a firmware updated basically made it useless for me and a whole load of first gen Airpod users. Will not buy anything expensive that I have to trash whole after the battery dies out. Apple never addressed the firmware issue either.
I wonder how much they care about audio going outwards instead of inwards. When people sit in a silent compartment on a train for example and have apple airpods, the entire compartment hears what they're listening to. I guess this is the price to pay for the surroundings to have an "open" device like that.
I don’t have airpods and don’t want them, but that doesn’t match my experiences being around them. They’re usually quite good at not letting out any sound unless they’re at the maximum volume and you’re listening to really loud music.
The price they pay is having me or the conductor telling them to knock it off. Public transport is uncomfortable enough without having to listen to their shitty music selection.
IIRC, iOS 8 cut the BTLE bitrate in half for using Apple APIs. I worked in the fitness tracker industry at the time, and this is why most major vendors used their own stack, rather than Apple's.
Apple APIs? I just thought of a generic bluetooth headset. On ios sound seems especially bad for me. My main comparison though is a dongle which is not bluetooth either.
That is true if we are talking about high end speakers or headphones. I doubt that with AirPods or any other in ear headphones you can hear the difference. These devices are not only built to a cost (even if they are sold at absurd prices, at which you can buy a decent quality wired headphones), but limited by the very small dimensions, that not only have to house the speaker itself but also a battery, the bluetooth receiver, the amplifier, the wireless charge controller for the battery.
Honestly the nitrate from Bluetooth is fine for decent quality audio if you use hardware without a mic and the speakers aren't trash. It works fine for me, I get quality that's world's better than what I've heard from airpods with my own Bluetooth setup
He says they'd like more bandwidth, but I'm not sure how much is really there. Even if you reduce the overhead by using a non-BT protocol, you're still limited by having to compete with all the other 2.4GHz signals. In your own house that's not bad, but when you're out and about among crowds, there can be enough noise that your signal can't get through well.
I would like to see apple just establish a personal area network standard. It would be great if we could have 802.11ax speeds. I'd like to be able to just drop battery powered SSDs in my bag, and access them on my Mac.
Rethinking about it, apple would probably cut storage in device entirely and sell space pod charged extra to have storage on your phone with BS transfer speed and call it courage. And Android manufacturers will mock them and do the same next iteration.
I do chuckle whenever I read about sound quality in wireless headsets and earbuds. So many millions are spent on the connection between phone and earbud, millions just to avoid the inconvenience of a wire. But go to any recording studio or radio station, anywhere that quality actually matters and you won't see anyone debating Bluetooth's bandwidth limitations. If you care about quality your equipment is wired.
Want real quality in wireless an earbud? Look for something called an In Ear Monitor (IEM). The abandon data links rely on oldschool radio frequencies. A decent rig will start at about 1000$.
If you go to any server farm, somewhere that network speed and stability actually matters, and you’ll see wired network connections. That doesn’t mean Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G isn’t good enough for the 99% of devices.
There’s a lot of devices (AirPod pro, WH-1000XM4, Quiet Comfort 45, below the $300 price point that offer
* Bluetooth
* Active Noise Cancellation
* Good microphones for calls
* Pretty good sound quality
These devices offer fantastic convenience, sound pretty good, and are generally affordable. Some of them even have a headphone jack. They compare to a Wi-Fi device to me, the net connection will never be as good as a wired, but the convince factor is “good enough”
The commenters replying to you are arguing protocol versus sound quality, and like you said, the connection method isn’t relevant here.
AirPods excel at a select few things. They sound passable enough for the general population, but they are a UX dream compared to what came before them.
Their real killer feature to me is their microphone performance and overall convenience for making phone calls. They go from off to connected and ready in time to answer the phone, without fuss or button pressing.
This, with its pocket sized packaging and generally decent enough music playback make it a good value proposition.
For the Pro model, they also have the most natural transparency mode I’ve ever heard, and they switch back and forth between modes quickly, which again helps for phone calls.
I think the idea that the AirPods audio quality “sucks” is an exaggeration. The intention was to have passable audio quality that the majority of people are fine with. It’s all the other stuff that makes the product a hit.
> Sure, I wouldn’t recommend the non-Pro model to anyone in the present day
That's the issue for a lot of people, myself included. At their price point, Airpods just don't compete with other earbuds in their price category. The "classic" Airpods line sounds pretty pitiful, and it's a little angering to listen to them and realize that this is the sound millions of other people are working with. Microphone performance in particular actually disappoints me; the wired Earpods had noticably better mic quality, and they only cost what, 20 bucks? Couple that with pretty uncharacteristically bad battery life, slippery cases and enclosure, not even an option for rubber ear tips... it's just a bit of a scam. Especially for $170.
The Airpods Pros are a little more understandable, but they're not really remarkable headphones. At least not $250 remarkable, to my ear. Don't even get me started on how "remarkable" the Airpods Max would have to be to justify a $500 price tag to listen to lossy, laggy Bluetooth audio.
> pure sound quality isn’t the main attraction
About 20 years, Apple made the iPod so that people could take CD-quality music on the go without compromising on the amount of music you could take with you. There was a time when Apple made products that did care about the quality of sound, the overall experience, and the genuine fidelity of what you listened to. Why do they need to regress? Why can't they just deliver a good pair of wireless earbuds to the masses? They've got some of the largest acoustic engineering teams in the world, I really do expect better from them, even on their $170 "budget" earbuds; they're a luxury company, it's okay to hold them accountable for things like this. They have billions of dollars in unspent research dollars, may as well tell them to put it where it counts.
AirPods sound fine. They're not my best headphones, but they sound fine. Audiophiling your way in, barreling in with quality takes like how they "suck ass"--gosh, why would I ever try to talk to you about this? The way you have written throughout this thread is pretty standard "combative audiophile jerk". If you want to be engaged with instead of blown off, perhaps act like you want to be engaged with.
I can tell you that I've had conversations with people who sound like the way you're writing and they're never worth the stress or the electrons perturbed. It's almost 2022 and the world is ever more grim. If I'm going to engage with somebody who wants a fight, I prefer it to be about something that matters. Not one's estimation of "trash speakers".
So I don't, I downvote, and I move on. I assume that's pretty normal.
I'm sorry, it's not a matter of "Audiophiling", the base-model Airpods are genuinely an unenjoyable listening experience relative to closed-tip, $20 Chinese earbuds. Their bass response is missing so badly that many songs just have their basslines cut completely off. The mids are scooped too for whatever reason, which makes your sound even tinnier and more fake. Maybe you like the convenience of wireless headphones (which I definitely sympathize with), but Airpods just don't sound good. Only the Airpods Pros have ever made me do a double-take, and only because they don't cut off any bass extension and sound, well, like regular earbuds. $250 for "actual earbuds" is a ripoff, period.
Go on with your high-and-mighty "I've got better things to argue about" shtick, but don't say things and then just expect people to leave you alone because you don't happen to care about it. Some people want to get their money's worth out of a pair of headphones, and Airpods are just not it.
I understand the criticism of AirPods. The Pros sound quite a bit better, you are absolutely right about that. I have no particular appreciation for them. (Their microphones make my life difficult, for example.) But, and I mean this intensely, few technical topics are worth dealing with jerks on the internet, and any misapprehension on this is probably my fault--I feel like I nerd-sniped you by engaging with the claim in question when it Absolutely Does Not Matter.
Forgive me if I misunderstand but it seems as though you're taking my post as some sort of appreciation for mediocre audio quality, and that isn't the point. It's not that there are "better" things to argue about--it's that there are less grinding people to discuss things with. It's not being "high and mighty" to not engage with people who are doing their best to make shitty the experience of engaging with them. The OP wanted to know why they were getting downvoted and the behavior, not the position, is the problem.
I'm far from perfect and I can be exhausting to deal with at times; I recognize this and I try to lay off the throttle. But I feel like HN is the only place I hang out on the internet where I find people who unironically act this way and then complain that nobody wants to interact with them. I may be very fortunate in that regard.
Is that not something to be angry about though? They're not $20 pack-in earbuds, they're $170 top-of-their-price-class accessories, they have every right to sound good or even great! Apple has billions of dollars in R&D, they deserve to figure out how to make their audio sound like a not-mess. Sony did it great, Bose does it well, even Jabra makes good-sounding earbuds at-or-below that price figure. So again, I stand by them sounding not good.
> I feel like HN is the only place I hang out on the internet where I find people who unironically act this way and then complain that nobody wants to interact with them.
Well, I'm certainly not mad if nobody is interacting with me :p Not sure where you're pulling that from, but I have yet to see it. Nitpicking, on the other hand, is what nerds do. It's just part of culture for people with a birds-eye view of a landscape to tell others when they're being taken for a ride; with Airpods, I think it's a little obvious that they're priced ridiculously for what they are. Next up I expect people to defend the surplus since they're a "fashion accessory" or the like...
Airpod pros sound fine. The originals sound like a tin can
Hearing even something like Bose is world's better, it seems to me like people who think original airpod audio is acceptable haven't listened to anything beyond the audio from the built in speakers on their TV
Changing the Bluetooth standard would not improve the original airpods which is my entire point.
Yes I sound combative, but only because this thread is comparing airpod audio against what? Nothing at all? The bar is apparently super low if someone thinks that original airpods are acceptable, it would make more sense to me to actually set the bar at a place with even decent reproduction across the frequency spectrum
People say Apple doesn’t innovate anymore under Tim Apple but you see everyone wearing AirPods. Every celebrity, pundit and news anchor have used AirPods during the pandemic.
I think it's dangerous to backup innovation the way you have here, the airpods may be innovative, but Apple actually doesn't need to innovate exactly because of the reasons you suggest
Because they have a reputation for being easy to use and tons of people are trapped in their ecosystem and will continue to buy their overpriced, privacy invading products because they don't want to learn anything else. Plus expensive stuff is a status symbol.
