It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up.
It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages.
Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk.
But because this was expensive and Apple supported it longer, it will have maybe lasted 10 years and one or two (pricey) battery replacements. This is still much worse than audiophile „analog“ headphones and I feel like this change is not adequately addressed.
I would really hope to see more approaches like Shure‘s „Aonic 215 True Wireless“ which is an arguably quite ugly attachment to the drivers that have been around for a long while and just adds the wireless capabilities and bluetooth. It can also be used for any other Shure driver afaik. This way you keep the good old sound producing piece while swapping out the stuff that will degrade over time.
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse.
I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it? Did your parents hand you down their headphones? Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs? So it maybe happened once? For a few people?
For the past 19 years I have been using same pair of Beyerdynamic headphones. I use them most days from morning till late evening. When I worked at the office, I would spend most of my time in them, too.
Let's calculate -- about 320 days a year * 14 hours a day * 19 years = 85k hours.
I think this represents about correctly how much time I spent with these.
I change pads, I open it every couple of years to clean dust and hair and I have fixed broken cable twice (by shortening and giving it new plug).
Can't say I inherited any audio equipment from my parents. Appreciation skipped a generation.
But I've had my AKG K240's for years and they're tireless. Not suitable so much for running around town, but they've been made since the 70's nearly to the same spec. The cable is removable, so are the ear pads and both replaceable.
edit: My opinions are so very different from an article another user posted about the same (which strangely runs counter to the larger, repeated experience and sentiment). They've always been lauded for their very open, lively soundstage and even, clear response.
I received from my dad most of his stereo headphone gear he'd /made/ from kit or magazine instructions in the 70s, still working perfectly fine if a bit archaic. I used it alongside new production tube amplifiers with vintage speakers which still function perfectly fine and are actually superior to similar speakers of new production.
On the headphone side, the technology has gotten massively between in the last 30 years, so all my headphones are from the 1990s or later, but for speakers, tower/cabinet speakers from the 1970s are still functional and good.
My primary set of headphones were purchased new in 2007. It's been 13 years, and they still work perfectly fine. The amplifier they're plugged into was manufactured in 1976 and has had a set of NOS Sylvania Green Hornet tubes swapped in.
It's true and false. I had some Grado S60s handed down from my dad. While this would seem to support the original argument, he kept them in a box for about 20 years and I broke them after 6 months by tripping over the cord. As far as I can tell, most consumer goods just don't last that long (~10-ish years).
I don’t want to dismiss your point, but I just inherited a pair of really high quality speakers from my dad’s days as a poor PhD student. He told me they were one of the nicest objects he owned, and it’s clear he is still proud of them.
The company that makes those speakers has long since gone out of business, but they still work and sound out of this world. I think this stands in sharp contrast to some of the practices we see today, e.g. Sonos intentionally bricking their old speakers.
My dad’s Sennheisers from the 1980’s still work well. They have the huge plug, so we have the adapter on it, but otherwise works fine. Foam had to be replaced once or twice, but otherwise it has surprised me how long they’ve lasted.
"How many decades have there been high-quality headphones "
I have a quarter of century old Beyerdynamic cans that still sound fantastic. I am not seeing their end-of-life any time soon, except the pads are probably going to need a change.
A lifetime is maybe a fantasy but both my shure se215 and dt770 are 6 or 7 years old and I expect them to last a while given they're in perfect working order after daily use for so long.
I highly doubt these new headphones with non user replaceable batteries would survive 2 years of daily usage, that would be 2+ full cycles per day for the airpods, seeing how tiny the batteries are I don't think they'd perform very good after even a year
I worked as a techie at a radio station for some years. We maintained (repaired on site) around ~20 pairs of professional headphones for studio usage, used by many hundreds of members of the station. Some of these headphones lifetime definitely exceeded a decade even with heavy use, requiring minor repairs e.g. cables and jacks.
Personally, I used one pair of ath-m50x's for about ten years. I just replaced it with some Beyerdynamic's, which I expect to also last at least ten years.
All of the Bluetooth headphones and speakers I've bought have lasted less than a few years. Half the time the batteries fail (and often aren't user-replaceable), the other half it's some component I'm unable to diagnose myself.
The headphones my parents purchased in the 1970s still work perfectly fine, actually. They haven't handed them down, though, as they still have them. This was extremely common in the past. There are plenty of people's grandparents now who bought nice cans in the 1970s or 1980s, many of which still work fine.
Honestly a $90 set of Sony MDR-7506 will last you 25 years if you replace the earpads every now and then. Probably the best sound out there for the price, and a decent portion of your music collection may have even been mixed and mastered with these cans so they are a great choice. Hear what the producer heard when they were laying the tracks.
Audio fidelity hit its stride decades ago. 40-50 year old stereos are still sought after, not because they look nice and are classic like a vintage car, but mostly because the sound quality is still excellent today.
Sennheiser's HD 25 are pretty iconic for DJs, and they were initially released in 1988.
They're also known as being pretty easy to fix, because you can find a replacement for virtually every part of them, and they're sold brand new to this day. Plenty of people that own this specific model have had them for more than a decade.
Anyway, my parents didn't pass me down a pair of HD 25s, but my pair (whose initial release is older than I am) is definitely going to be usable for my kids. Whether they'll want to use them or not remains to be seen.
Like most tech, I don't think the thing to think about is the lifetime of the device. Really nice headphones that are "vintage"(?) exist, as evidenced by the comments here. Leaving aside the fact that HN is notorious for having a strong segment of nearly any *-phile group...
The question is rarely the lifetime of the device. It's usually the lifetime of the interface. Or in this case, a headphone jack. 1/8", 1/4", etc... This is what normally gets obsoleted rather than the device itself. For headphones, the big switch is from wired to wireless. And I think that's where you'll see the shift. Yes, you can get a bluetooth adapter for traditional headphones, but they aren't great, and if you have audiophile wired headphones, you won't be happy with the sound. And so, the device won't be obsoleted because they fail, but rather the preferred interface changes to something that's incompatible. Maybe audio was lucky that there were adapters available for the first shift from 1/4" to 1/8"...
In this regard, I think the audio world is just catching up to their other brethren in the tech world.
I'm not sure what my kid will inherit, but I've replaced the ear pads on AGK 240s and Sony 7506s and they'll work for many years to come. Whereas the Beat Studio Pro I got for free when I bought a Mac are quite nice, when the battery final goes they'll be useless as despite having a cable, they only work when turned on (idiotic!).
Not to mention reliability. I had a $350 pair from Beyerdynamic that was really nice, but after 3 years of extremely gentle use (I only used them to listen to music in bed) the cable developed intermittent noise issues. Could I get them fixed? Sure, there’s probably a high-end audio store that would fix them for some large portion of the purchase price. But that’s probably true for most expensive wireless headphones as well. Instead, they just sat unused in my nightstand for a few more years and then got thrown away when I moved last year.
Not headphones but our home sound system is a Marantz system from 1983 which we inherited from a grandparent. The speakers would probably be massively outclassed by modern floor speakers (sound quality wise) but they are perfectly adequate for our needs. It even has an aux input so we can play music off our phones.
AFAIK the turntable and cassette player have had some minor repairs but nothing else has needed maintenance since purchase.
I'm also currently listening to music through a pair of HD202s I bought in 2007 which have copped endless abuse.
My main (wired) headphones are 15 years old now, with zero degradation. My headphone amp, turntable, and CD player are roughly the same age or older. I have no plans to get rid of them anytime soon. My parents haven't passed any down to me, mostly because they're still alive and using their own stuff, but my dad listens to music on speakers he bought in the early 70s. (I don't think my grandparents were ever serious about HiFi equipment, so nothing really to pass down. Half of them are also still alive.)
Got my headphones from my dad in the late 90s, h probably bought them in the 80s. Recently stopped using them, not because they didn't work but because I wanted a wireless pair.
I got Bose QC25 almost 5 years ago, they're still working. I've changed the cable and the pads twice but the headphones they've just get on ticking.
I've also got the Meze Classic 99 and they're even more solid. At 3 years old, I've not had to change the cable nor the pads, infact I've also got a backup cable that cable with them. I could easily see them lasting decades if looked after carefully.
Maybe it's a fantasy on headphone (as for most electronic). But I think the idea is more global : buy expensive stuff to keep them longer.
On headphone, the switch to Bluetooth-only with addition of batteries don't help on this scale.
But we should probably compare similar products (bluetooth headphone vs bluetooth headphone).
I bought my headphones (Audio Technica ATH-AD700s) when I was in school. I still use them now and they sound just as good as anything else you could buy.
Not quite generational inheritance but I can't think of anything else I bought back then that I still use. It's pretty satisfying when I think about it.
I have a pair audio-technica headphones, using them regularly for about 12 years...
I have pair of Monsoon Speakers bought since College (2000), so that's over 20 years. They still work great, just an headjack input, volume/bass control. Simple and they are connected to my PS4.
I have a dell monitor, bought in 2006, still working great with my mac. I bought an LG 4k one last year, and the Thubderbolt port just failed. Right now it is staying as a dead weight, and I am deciding if it is even worth fixing (or it can be fixed).
Some accessories do last decades. Apple accessories are made to last for 2-3 years and discarded after as they are not easily serviceable.
I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it?
I still have the Koss headphones I bought in the early 1990's. They still work, though they need a 50¢ phono adapter to plug into current gear. Also, I had to send them back to Milwaukee twice to be repaired. But Koss did it for free both times under the "lifetime warranty" program.
Did your parents hand you down their headphones?
Yes.
Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs?
No, they didn't. Mostly because headphones weren't invented yet.
> I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it?
My sennheiser HD600 was released 17 years ago. I've tried many other headphones over the years but it's the best I've heard from my very subjective ears. I've also changed almost every part from it due to wear and tear and it's amazing the amount of after market part you can find both from sennheiser and other vendors directly on ebay
I still have a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pro's I bought 20 years ago. That seemed like a lot of money for headphones back then. They have followed me to multiple continents, been on lots of flights and have had their pads replaced and still work great.
I recently moved to Bose NC700s because ya, wireless sure is nice, but I'd be surprised if they last 10 years, much less 20. Still have the HD's though and use them now and then.
I'm at 10 years with my Ultrasone Signature Pros and they look and function just like new. Of course they're not wireless and don't have a DAC built in so there's very little to go wrong, but despite being a person that upgrades my phone and laptop frequently - I don't see myself replacing them for another 10 years - they're pretty much perfect audio quality and comfort wise.
A family friend is a bit of an audiophile and has been using his Stax SR electrostatic headphones since 1985. His sony amp is also from around the same time. My gran is still using household appliances from 30+ years ago, so it could be a generational thing or it could be because expensive items were better made. Bit of both perhaps
My dad handed me down a pair of AKG cans he had been using since he was 20 (almost 25 years old now). My main headphones (AT-M40x) have lasted almost 8 years so far, and I've only needed to replace the earpads. The next to go is the cable, but I don't really need to worry since it comes with an extra cable in the box.
maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but it rings (mostly) true to me. my dad has a pair of grado rs-1's he's been using for as long as I can remember. he also has a very nice pair of b&o speakers that I'm pretty sure predate my existence altogether. only reason they haven't been handed down is because my dad is still alive and enjoying them. I'm sitting here wearing a pair of sennheiser hd-555's that I bought in 2008. they're plugged into a DAC I bought in 2010.
I don't know that there's some grand tradition of handing down audio gear over generations, but the point is good audio equipment lasts a long time if the properly cared for. if it sounded good new, it probably sounds good years later too (except tubes, these are consumables). there's no reason why headphones should follow the obsolescence cycle of computers.
I used to use very old AKG K240s, and the cheap chinese IEMs I use right now have replaceable cables, filters that can be cleaned, and can be opened to replace connectors and even drivers (which are standardized parts). I've been using them for three years and I don't see why I would stop.
I have two pairs of headphones AKG K550(4 years for personal) and Sennheiser HD380(2.5 years, work). I use them daily, they should last a few more years for sure.
Companies should be rewarded when producing something that last. Externalities and disposal should be included in tax rate.
My headphones are over 17 years old. I’ve replaced called, cushions, bands etc. over the years.
I recently bought a new cake with integrated microphone, so I can use it for conferencing
It's not fantasy, I think that's far too rhetorically strong.
In many other contexts 25 years would be referred to a "generation" or a "lifetime", I think this is more pedantic than it is a generous interpretation of GPs point, which was that It's an enormous increase in e-waste.
Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk.
I agree, they really are consumables. I had two pairs of regular AirPods. All of them barely last through a meeting now. It's not like I have used them intensively, some meetings every week, and for listening to podcasts when I am cycling.
Not only can a good wired headphone last you for many years, if you are not an audiophile, you can buy a reasonable Sennheiser for a fraction of the cost of the AirPods Max or even AirPods Pro.
The AirPods and AirPods Pro are great if you need something for on the go, but you have to factor in that you have to replace them every two years or so.
(I love the Pro's transparency mode for cycling. However, they are unusable for me when walking due to the 'thumping' sound that many others also suffer from.)
The ‘thumping‘ sound on the Pro model is a reason for a warranty replacement. Apple has acknowledged the mass occurring defect and ships a replacement after contacting the support (you have to send the faulty item back).
Maybe AirPods Max's battery lasts better than AirPods because its space and weight isn't limited like that so Apple can configure looser max/min battery use level to lasts more.
My Sony MDR-V6s were purchased by a relative in the 1980s for use with a vinyl deck and are connected to a Mac today, having worked with cassettes, minidiscs, CDs and iPods along the way. With nothing more than replacement earpads they still sound great.
Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.
Um, since at least 1970 with arrival of the Koss 4As.[1] And these were followed up by similar classics such as the AKG K240s from the early 1980s as well as the Grado SR80Es or Sony MDR7506s from the early 90s.[2][3][4]. However there are many more.
There is quite an active market for these and they are highly sought after because of their audiophile and build quality. Anyone who was fortunate enough to have inherited them likely
for those reasons.
Another thing here is -- I'm not sure how many people here have had to sort through their parents' and older relatives' stuff after they're gone, but I'm sure it's more than a few.
How many kids will want Dad's headphones from the 70s? Probably a few, but I would wager that for a lot of us, sifting through our parents' old hardware probably means a lot of figuring out what has sentimental value, what has actual use (e.g. even if I wanted to keep my folks' nice old record player, none of my music is on records and I'm not about to start buying physical media just because the player's there), and what's headed off to Goodwill.
It's nice to imagine a world where your re-padded headphones are still in use in 2070 when you're long in the cold ground, but that seems like a nostalgic fantasy more than reality for the vast majority of people and hardware.
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse.
I have never, ever, ever known this to have happened. I’ve never once seen a 20+ year old set of headphones, let alone one that has been handed down through generations. That just silly talk.
Not to mention the fact that even if this had happened in a handful of times, the headphones would have outlived multiple cabinet sized sets of audio equipment, and several hundred pounds worth of record, 8 track, tape, and CD players - all of which wound up in a landfill somewhere. So you’ve reused the smallest component of all of that for what?
For what it's worth, the wireless headphones mentioned by the review as the best previous set (the Bang & Olufsen / Beoplay H9i) do come with a user-removable battery and do allow listening via USB-C as well. Somehow these never get mentioned in mainstream reviews, only Bose and Sony, even though they have superior fit & finish and, according to this review, sound as well.
I'm of the impression that Apple implements a recycling program for their devices to address the e-waste concern. Provided their recycling program is credible, this seems like a reasonable solution--better even than analog headphones that will still go bad eventually with the user on the hook for locating a credible electronics recycling program (and more likely, throwing them in the dump).
The use cases for many people have changed dramatically as well. I think if I was an audiophile, and used headphones primarily to lie on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, I would share your concerns.
But I use headphones for two things: talking on the phone/listening to music when I walk my dogs or to pick up my kid, and for meetings at work (I'm long-term remote). Having cordless technology is nice for the former, where it replaced cheap wired earbuds that are always tangled in my pocket and never last for more than a year or so. It's critical for the second, so that I am not chained to my desk for the 1-2.5 hour meetings that I have multiple times a week. And I have to talk with my use cases, not just listen.
The heirloom-quality audiophile headphones are simply not workable for my use case, and I am sure that I am not alone here. And my father, who I am pretty sure did spend lots of time lying on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, did not ever pass his headphones down to me.
I've had to replace my airpods 2 times in 3 years. Once because they slid out of my pocket (the find my airpods app is useless) and again because the battery and speaker degraded after less then 15 months of use.
Have others had similar experiences with the airpods?
If you use your Airpods enough (ie. all day at work, on phone calls, etc) - you can easily wear out the battery in that amount of time. 2-3 charges per day in 15 months gets to about the 1000 charge area where the battery begins to drop quickly.
The Pros also had a design defect that led to a crackle. I had both my Pro earpieces replaced a few months back - independently, for that issue.
In any case, Airpods are meant to be disposable. Apple does not replace the batteries on them for battery service issues, you just get new ones.
The Maxes are different, the battery can be serviced, and it will last considerably longer - at about 5x the life per charge, you will likely exhaust the shelf life of the battery before it dies from usage.
Bluetooth audio profile has gone unchanged for 20 years.
I still have non-A2DP headsets (the early 2000s ones you see in movies) that pair perfectly with a modern laptop, and Bluetooth 1.x PDAs (~2003ish) that pairs correctly with a modern BT headset (in HSP profile, so audio quality is crap, but then again it's the best the PDA could do).
It's a big worry on the smaller AirPods, since those are almost 100% battery and glued together (and I'm not sure how you could build a product like that in a way that's both small and has a replaceable battery). For the big cans, you can pay $80USD to get the batteries replaced if the headphones are out of warranty (and, presumably, the warranty will cover the full cost of a battery replacement).
It was sillier when people were complaining about the wastefulness of the original AirPods. The real crime there was the fact that you spent $150 on something that only lasts a few years. As far as waste goes, I think two 20 oz soda bottles contribute more to waste than a pair of tiny wireless earbuds, and those only get used for an hour before being discarded.
Not to mention even with the original comparison, AirPods + the case are 1/5 the material of a good pair of cans. Hell, even just the thick cord of nice headphones is the same amount of material as one set of airpods. Don’t like that you toss them every other year? Abstain from a bottle or two of beer and boom you’ve come out ahead in waste generation.
Fair point, though I'm not sure there are enough people who are wealthy enough to pay $550 for headphones to meaningfully contribute to e-waste.
Regular AirPods, which are not repairable AFAIK, are more affordable and widely used. But they are also very small, so even if people replaced them every 2-3 years, the amount of waste would be minuscule compared to their waste from takeout containers, food waste, and other refuse. I suppose you could also factor in the energy spent producing and shipping the units, but it's not as if repairable headphones (all of which are much larger than regular AirPods) don't also incur these costs when they are produced and repaired.
So while I agree that it would be great if we could have more repairable things, I'm not sure that this is an especially good example of a product that will meaningfully contribute to e-waste.
> contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up
Sincerely asking here, but what do you see are the most significant negative externalities here? We're not exactly running out of landfill space anytime soon, and most landfills in the US are very careful to ensure waste doesn't pollute the surrounding environment.
Is it the greenhouse gas emissions? I'm curious how the total emissions on buying a pair of headphones every 2-5 years compares to other everyday activities like shipping my weekly usage of broccoli to the grocery store for me to eat.
Is it the concern of labor going to waste? Something else?
I bought my cans when I was fresh out of uni and entering the workforce. They were only £125 which in the grand scheme of things isn't that expensive but I wanted at least 5 years but ideally a lot longer out of them.
My Bose QC1s barely lasted 15 months (thank god for Amazon's godtier returns policies at the time).
Swore off Bose and got some Beyerdynamics. I think I did have some problems actually but I returned those and my current cans are ~6 years old IIRC
I like the Bose sports earbuds, seems like no one else has worked out that IEMs are a terrible idea for sports sigh though now I just use bone conduction
I’ve had my q15’s 7 years now. They use aaa batteries and I use rechargeable batteries. I used a set of two for 4 years, now on the second set. Replaced the cups for 50usd, but now the head band is going... I hope to replace them.
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages.
That's a pretty tiny market. It was also "you spend ten dollars at the grocery store for cheap Sony headphones or earbuds and then they break and then you do it again. Sound quality is terrible."
They did have fewer batteries, though, at least, in terms of the disposability problem.
There actually exist bluetooth adapters for wired headphones. Unfortunately, they haven’t tracked as much hype and attention as wireless headphones. But we all know that irrational customer behavior is the foundation of modern consumerist economy.
So, Buy It For Life (and Hand It Down To Your Kids) strategy is elitist in the same way having the basic understanding of thermodynamics is - only a very small amount of people have and appreciate those ideas.
Walking around with wired headphones plugged into a bluetooth dongle kind of defeats the purpose, no? People buy wireless headphones because they don't want to be encumbered by wires while walking around.
An adapter like that is yet another thing I need to put in my bag, and lacks at least some of the convenience that comes with having headphones that just wirelessly connect to my phone natively.
A bicycle could be passed down the generations but not an electric car. Lithium wears down, software stops being updated, parts stop being produced, etc.
That's the price you pay for feaures. Clunky wired 1970s headphones don't fit my use case which requires headphones to be compact and wireless. The same way my electric car outperforms a super-serviceable Model T.
Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other.
Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.
> Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other.
But they _are_. By now I have seen many review videos that compare them with the typical audiophile/sound production headphones. E.g. Marques compared them with the Sennheiser HD800S [1].
> Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.
Does it not? If I can reuse the housing, the drivers, earpads, headband and just need to replace the battery when its dead, does this not reduce e-waste?
Also I do not condemn wireless headphones in general, I said it is a shame that products which could be used for many decades in the past become e-waste rather quickly in today's world. And that I would prefer the approach Shure is taking to reduce waste and only replace the highly degrading components (at least with their monitors).
Use the crappy headphones that came bundled with the portable cassette player, which before too long broke or wore out, and buy another crappy pair because that's what you can afford. Or buy a new cassette player or portable CD player to replace what you had.
Waste from consumer products didn't start with blue tooth headphones.
A lot has changed. For better or worse, a lot of headphones are chosen for how they look, not how they work. How many fashion items do you use for your lifetime and pass them down to your kids? People do that with expensive watches but I'm having a hard time thinking of other fashion items that are durable across generations.
I like the Fiio BTA10, which is a bluetooth (aptX-compatible) add-on for Audio-Technica MSR7 & M50X (two different versions of the add-on).
Battery life is not great (a few hours), but it is a small addon which fits nicely into the headphones, and can be easily replaced when it breaks or dies.
The batteries are going to be a consumable if users continue to demand a wireless experience, which most of them seem to prefer, regardless of whether that’s delivered as a dongle or integrated into the headset. It would be nice if we didn’t demand so many things with batteries in them, but that isn’t IMO an Apple problem, that’s a demand pattern. Encasing them in the product might even keep batteries out of landfill. An old AA or laptop battery is easy to pitch, a $550 headset is much more likely to be repaired by someone in a position to recycle the battery.
Bluetooth and the integrated form factor is a risk, but I think that’s not a ten year concern. It would be nice if they had a physical port for the eventuality though.
Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse
Maybe a few people hand down usable audio equipment, but the only stereo equipment I got from my parents was an 8-track tape collection and a console stereo.
For you youngsters that don't know what that is, it's a stereo system (usually tuner + turntable + speakers, some of the more modern ones had a cassette player too) built into a piece of furniture the size of a dresser. My parents, being the audio connoisseurs they were, had an 8-track player that sat on top.
I'm not sure how to reconcile your two "wants" here. A battery and a current bluetooth chip are required for any pair of headphones to function wirelessly, no matter what. Bluetooth has been pretty good about keeping backwards compatibility, so I wouldn't worry about these becoming unusable when a new version of the BT spec comes out.
If you don't actually "want" a pair of wireless headphones, then the AirPods Max aren't targeting you at all. Absolutely nobody should buy these if they don't intend to use them in wireless mode, there are better wired headphones available for less money.
I’m not sure you “want” to understand me. I treat them as __headphones__ and simply stated that it was a shame that (esp. expensive) headphones which used to hold up for a long time are now worthless after a few years. That’s it.
> It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up.
That's an excellent point. No tech product can be a "BIFL" (Buy It For Life) product, but it'd be nice if all companies were as good as Apple at making their products recyclable, and making recycling easy.
The AirPods are notorious for being absolutely shitty to recycle though. They're tiny, held on with glue and have batteries inside that you have to get out in order to recycle the rest of them.
These are wireless problems, not specific to Apple head/earphones. The attached wireless module like the Shure's one (and there's plenty of others, for example FiiO) do not address the environmental impact at all. Because what breaks is the battery and that's the environmentally unfriendly stuff - the drivers are nothing in comparison.
Something made of 380 grams of material that takes up maybe half of a cubic foot of space, that you use every day for 2-4 years really isn't that big of deal in terms of waste. Single-use plastics like takeout containers and other food packaging, and plastic/foam packaging in shipping boxes seem orders of magnitude worse. And we're not running out of landfill space anyway.
The only way forward I see is to make significant cuts to some of this really low-hanging fruit of single-use plastics (which also have other harms like environmental micro-plastics and inherently requiring fossil fuel use), maybe come up with better ways to recycle the aluminum and stainless steel in a product like these headphones, but most of all to move away from fossil fuels in the manufacturing chain and in the operation of landfills.
The cat is already out of the bag, people enjoy getting new toys like these and the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world have the disposable income to afford to buy products like this if they want to is amazing. I don't think talking up the good old days when disposable income was a lot more scarce and consumer goods were relatively much much more expensive is going to make much of a difference.
While Bluetooth may eventually drop backward compatibility, my daily driver headphones are four c.2007 Dell BH200 A2DP sets. Highly adequate. All are on their second battery, a commodity 500mAh LiPo from eBay. To hell with this overpriced Apple trash.
It used to be like this: Every 2 years I bought new Sennheiser cx300II's (until I somehow got a pair that seemed to lack bass) because the cable broke. Now my 16$ qcy's (BT) are 3 years old and still fine.
It's a detailed, well-written review, but like most mainstream headphone reviews it makes me cringe a little. Though masked somewhat by self-deprecating remarks, there's audiophile "woo" peaking out from behind the corner (e.g. the comment about lossless compression). More importantly, it's missing the most important part of a headphone review: a measurement of the frequency response curve!
It's fairly well known that above the ~$100 price level, headphone sound quality differences mostly disappear once equalized properly [0]. The real test is not stock AirPods versus H9i (as done in the review), it's AirPods versus H9i once they're both equalized to a common frequency target. Otherwise you're testing the manufacturer's tuning as much as the actual quality of the hardware.
Certainly, there's something to be said for the manufacturer getting it right in the first place so you don't have to bother with EQ when listening on a mobile device, etc. But I think the following two points are likely true:
1) People will score the AirPods highly in subjective listening tests;
2) The performance in those listening tests has more to do with the frequency tuning of the AirPods than anything about its hardware, and you could get a virtually identical listening experience with a $100 to $200 pair of Sennheisers and an EQ app.
These headphones have a DSP that continually reconfigures the response, I'm not sure that any synthetically generated frequency response curve would actually mean anything.
This is true, and so do a lot of high end headphones that are not studio monitors. Pretty much any of them over $300 have a DSP in them configured to a curve.
So it's intentionally distorting sound? Even so, it could be measured and compared, with more complex sound patterns (as opposed to sine waves or whatever is normally used for frequency response).
> it's missing the most important part of a headphone review: a measurement of the frequency response curve!
Why is it the most important part? As you said this is a main-stream headphone review.
From my experience, most consumers don't enjoy listening to music w/ a flat curve - if that is where you're going with this. I've sunk several thousand dollars into high-end gear, and even I don't want a flat curve. A flat curve is most useful if you are an audio engineer working in a studio. I'd much rather use different headphones for different kinds of music, than compromise and use a flat-curve which sounds incredibly boring (to me).
Considering he's linking to Sean Olive's (the main guy behind Harman's research into headphones and Harman curve) blog, he's likely very much aware that flat frequency response doesn't sound good.
A frequency response curve should be included because it provides useful information to (some) consumers, not because a "flat" curve is necessarily desirable. While the entire experiance cannot be discerned from a curve alone, and users can eq the signal, it provides a good idea of what the headphones will actually sound like, and a set of priorities and tradeoffs made in designing the headphones.
> It's fairly well known that above the ~$100 price level, headphone sound quality differences mostly disappear once equalized properly [0].
This depends on your definition of "mostly disappear". If you mean, ignoring, soundstage, imaging, distortion, and other parameters that affect sound, then yes, but even a non-audiophile could easily discern the difference between an open-back vs. a closed-back headphone with identical magnitude response (by your definition, the differences between these two headphones should have mostly disappeared).
From linear signal analysis, magnitude adjustments do not provide enough degrees of freedom (and thus are not sufficient) to transform any response into another response. And this is true for practical sound signals not just theoretical concoctions.
Take a look at any headphone review at rtings.com where they try to capture other parameters in addition to magnitude response. They test for phase response (related to imaging), PRTF (pinna-related transfer function --- related to soundstage), and harmonic distortion. These would not automatically match between headphones that were modified by gain adjustments to have identical magnitude response.
> the difference between an open-back vs. a closed-back headphone with identical magnitude response (by your definition, the differences between these two headphones should have mostly disappeared).
What an uncharitable reading! They said the quality differences mostly disappear.
I don't see the problem with that? A combination of specific sounds and practice picking them out will make certain tracks far more demanding than others. For example, loud clear bass sounds of various types are a great test that many speakers will fail.
I had made a similar comment before reading yours. I am really glad I am not alone, here. I was absolutely taken aback by the lack of Frequency Response curve graph in a so-called audiophile review, and as a pro audio engineer on the side I am consistently driven nuts by this.
There is so, so much subjectivity in headphone reviews, and so little science these days - if I had any interest in doing so whatsoever I would certainly start up my own review site, refuse to review headphones that were given to me by the companies themselves to assure a lack of bias, and - you know - actually do some science.
I, for one - would be interested in doing my own sets of frequency response data and comparing them to what these companies should be providing to start, and so often do not.
Ugh. Hybrid consumer/pro audio gear is the worst. >.<
This is a headphone for listening to music, not for audio mixing. I wish you success with your review site idea, but it would not be one I would personally seek out (saying this as an audio nut myself). There are a few websites that measure more than just the sound signature though - e.g. https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm4-wi...
As an aside, applying scientific principles doesn't automatically make the review any better. Science works by proposing a hypothesis/model and collecting data to see if the data matches the model. If your hypothesis/model is just average, and not world-class, then the most carefully collected data doesn't hold much weight/value.
For e.g. Minor changes in the sound signature/frequency response are only audible when you listen to the same music across multiple headphones, and that too when you're carefully listening. Also the sound signature can vary when the fit of the headphone changes as per the individual head shape/ear shape/etc. All this is assuming there is enough manufacturing tolerance to produce headphones with identical sound signatures, etc, etc.
Ultimately you'll have to come up with a hypothesis/model that is better than the current one. Which is not to say it can't be done, but its a tall order, but I hope you give it a shot at-least. If nothing else you'll have a cool blog post :)
The problem is all these review sites are pseudo experts writing copy of how it fits into a hipster/techster/trending life with just substance to pass off as an educated conclusion.
But don't worry, there is a place for FFT graphs. rtings.com is excellent for reviews on audio and visual gear.
As a counterpoint to your #2, what proportion people using $100-$200 headphones equalize them properly?
This strikes me as similar to displays. Most people don't do any calibration, and reviewers tend to review both the monitor calibrated from factory and after their own custom calibration.
"The correlation between price and sound quality is close to zero and, slightly negative: r = -.16"
This seems absurd on its face and should really cause the researchers to re-evaluate their model. Just because their research shows people prefer a certain EQ doesn't mean there aren't any other benefits to better designed products, like soundstage, detail, clarity etc.
Unfortunately I think they're locked behind the paywalls of various journals, or internal Harman research. You can piece a lot of together from his blog posts, but it's rather labor-intensive.
Or how a felt tip pen applied to the edge of a CD can stop the laser from spilling out, and make the sound much more focused.
Here's a recent review I encountered while looking for something tangentially related: "These QED audio cables promote a wide-open soundstage, both vertically and horizontally. They help vocals sound full-bodied and weighty, but with lots of breathing space above them, too. Put simply, if you covet space and detail with sure but nimble footwork and heaps of insight, consider your search for an RCA audio cable complete."
>It is, therefore, my sworn duty to be skeptical of consumer technology companies encroaching on the territory of high-end audio equipment built by companies with decades of experience.
> but their track record with audio hardware is inconsistent. Somehow, the company that makes the HomePod—a marvel of mono speaker engineering—is also the company that continues to make and sell Beats products.
When Beats were acquired by Apple. Especially with Jimmy Iovine in charge of Apple Music ( initially ). I was extremely worried that any of the crap Beats made infect Apple's Audio. Turns out Apple has Firewalled their department pretty well. I remember reading one of the story about HomePod team asking Jimmy Iovine's opinion on its audio quality. His reply was his usual " You need more Bass".
Apple audio engineering teams consist of many engineers from Bowers & Wilkins . One of my favourite brand in Audio Equipment. ( I think, I could be wrong, Steve Jobs likes Bowers & Wilkins too ) And you should notice their taste of Audio have many similar traits.
So Beats continue to make crap, they did improve somewhat since Apple's purchased them. And Apple, continues to be Apple.
But that is only with Audio, the AirPods Max Hardware Design is very much modern Apple and non-Bowers & Wilkins. The weight and comfort issues. Something about Apple's Design Department changed ever since Steve Jobs is not there to be the Editor to edit things. Things like Keyboard, TrackPad or Headsets. User Comfort and usage are no longer the 1st priority. Instead it is aesthetics and design goals, that could be material ( the need to use Metal ), thinner or colour.
Design is how it works, not how it looks. Hopefully recent Mac changes meant they learned a thing or two.
Apple's mice have always been form over function (with some rationalized nonsense to try and pretend that it's actually about function). That was directly from Steve Jobs who supposedly mistook an unfinished mock as a mouse with no buttons.
I like the weight of the Max headphones and how they feel premium rather than plastic, I also use them at my desk and don't think they're uncomfortable. The butterfly keyboard, and touchbar are post-jobs failures though, but we're almost done with them.
I guess my point is that there were mistakes during the Jobs era too, people just forget them.
> I remember reading one of the story about HomePod team asking Jimmy Iovine's opinion on its audio quality. His reply was his usual " You need more Bass".
The fact that the author thinks the HomePods have great sound rather makes me doubt his audiophile qualifications. I consistently have to listen to music at a much lower volume than I want because even at a moderate volume, the bass hurts my ears. Listening to classical is even more annoying, as everything is fine until some poor instrument wanders in to the HomePod's "BOOST THAT BASS" range and suddenly the balance is all wrong.
I returned a homepod after really wanting to like it. I tried several locations, didn't matter, the bass is overpowering.
There's a HUGE bass boost. It's unlistenable to anyone familiar with what a relatively neutral frequency response should sound like.
I don't know what type of curve they are targeting with all of their auto-eq magic but if you're not going to make it user-adjustable, I don't know why you would choose a bass cannon.
The rumors that Apple purchased Jimmy Iovine and Beats Music, and also got a mediocre headphones company in the bundle are most likely true. Apple needed to launch their music service, not their audio hardware business, so the acquisition worked and payed dividends on that front. They're probably squeezing Beats for all it's worth now because they can. But I'm sure from an engineering perspective Beats still brings nothing of value to the table now as it didn't then.
I don't think so. Beats headphones were the first thing since the iPod that was approaching Apple's cachet with young music fans. They were fashionable. That is Apple's turf.
> So Beats continue to make crap, they did improve somewhat since Apple's purchased them. And Apple, continues to be Apple.
They don't, they make good headphones now. Nobody knows this because they don't listen to the products, have never listened to them, and rely on jokes they read on the internet 10 years ago.
I saw a great documentary about Rams, which was put online as free to watch - but for only a month or so. Not sure whether it was this one, but I think that it might be. There's a chance you might find it archived somewhere:
The only affordable consumer audio products I have liked are from Marshall. They make a good lineup of bluetooth speakers for home use. I picked up one of those, and it sounds very good for its price. It has very decent bass, and generally good response all across the range. And just for fun, I put a processed guitar in aux input, not bad at all.
Another one which I like a lot are the range of mini amps from Laney. They aren't targeted for normal home use, but they can be used with bluetooth and aux-in. For their price and size, they sound very good. As a guitar amp...ehhh its OK for the price, but its portable.
Its really telling that both are veteran music gear companies.
Interesting, I own a pair of Bowers and Wilkins PX headphones and they sound great, no complaints aside from the year the firmware got stuck in some failure state and they wouldn't reboot/function until the battery died.
I have the same issue with my PX, every two months or so I have to use the paper clip to hard reboot them. Kind of annoying to need to do for a $400 pair of headphones, but they sound great, look good, and are very comfortable.
> But that is only with Audio, the AirPods Max Hardware Design is very much modern Apple and non-Bowers & Wilkins. The weight and comfort issues.
My B&W PX headphones suggest that they have plenty of weight and comfort issues of their own. ;) Sennheiser Momentums were much more comfy, but didn't sound as good :|
As much as I appreciate these in-depth reviews of the AirPods Max, they always feel like reviews of, say, a Burberry coat.
Although this is pure unproven (and maybe unprovable) speculation, I think that people buying such products have already decided to do so at some deep emotional level, and any half-decent review just provides the necessary rationalization for an otherwise excessive purchase.
Absolutely get what you're saying, however I wonder if in the audiophile world the opposite is the case: Apple is seen as the inferior interloper and this is rationalizing giving them a chance?
I bought them because of two features:
1. I own a pair of Bose 700 and on YouTube they “crackle”. It’s worse when watching something at 1.5x and it’s really distracting when you’re watching a talk or tutorial.
2. Bose switch automatically to the first device connected. So let’s say I’m in the middle of a zoom call waiting for participants to join. If my phone is the first device and I browse a site with a voice add or click something by accident, the Bose switched to that sound source.
Neither are terrible inconveniences but it’s a minor life improvement to not deal with those things. Is that worth $550? Not sure. But I’m glad I spent the money.
> switch automatically to the first device connected
I think this is a generic Bluetooth audio chipset problem - I know it happens both with my Taotronics dongle and my PLT headphones. Bloody annoying when I'm listening to something on the phone, I've forgotten the Macbook is also connected, and bash beeps, killing the music.
Bose ain't held in some high regard in hifi community neither. They have good active noise cancellation, and marketing. But that's about it. Quality of reproduction is subpar in the price level.
These days there are many other aspects to using headphones, ie as you mention how things work over bluetooth. Or comfort (which alone would kill these for me, even if they would be properly great in everything else). Or various signalling with purchases.
Anyway as long as everybody is happy with what they have all is good.
"The reason that other high-end headphone manufacturers lean heavily on plastic and even wood in their builds isn’t that they can’t afford metal. It’s because they’re interested in having human beings wear these products on their heads for hours at a time."
It's very typical for Apple. They make some very nice products, but they unfortunately apply a one-size-fits-all approach for most of their products and don't give a shit about ergonomics.
They sell products that work for 80% of people. I can't use the Apple mouse because it gives me wrist pain. My partner can't use Airpods because they hurt her ears. Their products work for some people, but if you're unlucky you can only go buy some other companies product.
It always struck me as odd, that despite all their focus on accessibility in software, they seem to ignore ergonomics for the most part. Probably because offering the smallest number of hardware models is more important to them than covering the whole market.
I know from people working at Apple that they’re acutely aware of this, but it’s a hard problem to deal with. Turns out that the variance of human ears is so big that it’s nearly impossible to make something fit all. Hence you will always exclude a certain percentage of people.
This was particularly bad for the original ear pods and normal AirPods (80% if I remember correctly), is much better for the AirPod pros with their exchangeable inner ear pieces (90%), and even better with the AirPod Max’s (95%).
Though if your ears are at the extreme end you’re out of luck. I guess it’s an unfair version of Darwin’s law... can’t really blame Apple for that though. Other headphone manufacturers don’t act differently in that regard.
> but they unfortunately apply a one-size-fits-all approach for most of their products and don't give a shit about ergonomics.
Their H1 chipset line includes a fair number of products for different uses, ears and preferences.
AirPods Mark II, AirPods Pro w/ 3 separate tip sizes, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro which IIRC had 4 or 5 tip sizes in the box (would have to dig it out to check), the Beats Solo Pro and the 2020 Powerbeats.
Not all of these are good fits on me, and I’ve owned or tried most of them. Pretty sure the remainder of the Beats line sold today that I haven’t listed is still on the W1 which is still a decent enough chip, although I’ve found the H1 to have superior wireless performance in crowded downtown San Francisco where the W1 would have trouble maintaining a connection to my phone.
For all the headphones they sell, I think there are still some gaps in Apple’s lineup to fill and room for other products in the market. I don’t know what their plans are, but if they intend to remain contenders they probably are working on designs that you might like more, unlike say, the mouse, where they made Ive’s platonic ideal of a mouse and seemed to have called it a day, there is no range or differentiation: you can have a Magic Trackpad or you can have a Magic Mouse. I mean that’s fine, I’m happy with my Logitech mouse.
Using a magic mouse is near-instant wrist pain for me. Although I like the idea of gestures on the mouse, it just won't work for me. On the other hand, the logitech MX ergo has been stellar for me for the past year!
> Probably because offering the smallest number of hardware models is more important to them than covering the whole market.
This is in the institutional DNA of Apple because it saved the company in the late nineties. Steve Jobs famously came in and canned dozens of Mac models, arguing that only four were needed: A pro desktop and a consumer desktop, a pro laptop and a consumer laptop. And that was that.
Apple is, what, a hundred times bigger today, but I don’t think the product design side of the company has really scaled up as much. I think they could afford to expand a bit.
I've tried Bose and Sony noise cancelling headphones and they've all given me a headache from pressure under my ears. After reading some reviews of these, I decided to give them a shot to see how they compare. So far they are a lot more comfortable for my head shape, and I haven't noticed the weight being an issue, yet.
I was gifted a high end pair of Beats many years ago, and my reaction was that music sounded “fun”. They couldn’t replace my studio monitor headphones, which were way more accurate. But they hyped up music in a way that was pleasurable.
If you shoot photos or video, you may be familiar with flat color profiles. RAW photos, or Log color profile videos. That flatness is important for professional work. But sometimes you want a JPG straight out of a Canon camera because their “color science” is gorgeous, and the photo doesn’t need much correction. Otherwise — fashion trends aside — an unprocessed RAW is dull.
At this price point, I feel like the Max’s are for people who want a quality fashion accessory that sounds amazing with little work. Kind of like the Bose speakers my dad splurged on when I was a kid. I’d later find out they were not considered great speakers. Did we care? No. They made movies fun, and brought my dad joy as he cleaned the house on Saturday’s blasting Led Zeppelin or some 80s New Wave cassette.
But for a professional tool, the author’s comparison to computational photography catches my eye. Because, despite buying every high-end iPhone for the camera system, I’m perennially frustrated. My DSLR smokes it, consistently. The computational stuff is impressive, but it still just doesn’t come close to reliably capturing quality shots the way my Canon does. But the “best camera is the one you have with you” — and when I’m out and about, I still appreciate having the lates-and-greatest iPhone camera system.
Anyway, long winded but my point isn’t to throw shade at the new Max’s. I haven’t tried them personally. I came close to buying them, but considered the back order and price and decided on some AirPod Pros - my first wireless ear buds. And I love them! They’re life changing for me because I can clean, and exercise, and turn on noise cancellation and get stuff done.
I think the bottom line is, if you love Apple stuff, don’t care about the price — or are excited to splurge on high end accessory — and you don’t do professional audio work, I get the impression that you’ll probably love these headphones. But professional audio engineers are probably going to still rely on monitors for serious work.
> But professional audio engineers are probably going to still rely on monitors for serious work.
Especially due to the dynamic equalization of which OP speaks. You cannot have this when you are working with true sound (like you say with the photos: no professional camera should distort colours without you being able to control that).
I've used them since the day they came out, and they are on my head basically 50% of my non-sleeping time. Good buy.
They don't feel heavy at all, I love the physical design, music sounds great. I hope spatial sound comes to Apple TV, I find it kind of pointless to have spatial sound depending on the position of the iPad / iPhone, I'd rather have spatial sound encoded in the content I am listening to, for example when watching a movie.
In the beginning I thought that the case is bad, but I actually got used to it now. Compared to my Sony-XM3 case, this is a case I ACTUALLY USE. The only stupid thing is that the little hole/nudge in the case for charging doesn't align properly because I've adjusted the AirPods to my head. Oh well. That's really the only thing I can complain about, so that should tell you how f** great they are.
I really don't understand why spatial audio has to depend on the device having gyro (mems).
I often stick my ipad under my monitor, plug it in, and then pop the headphones on. The ipad doesn't move. It doesn't need to move - for the next two hours, it's a dongle, a very flat appletv.
Spatial audio still works like this. If I pause, look away, and unpause - where I was looking when I unpaused is the new centre. It's not depending on the ipad's position at all, just origin plus delta.
I get that the iphone/ipad need more than this, in-case the device is moving too. But it's not a hard requirement. If the device doesn't move (eg, my appletv hasn't moved for 3 years), then it doesn't need a gyro/mems to tell you it hasn't moved. I think you can safely assume my TV hasn't moved, and if it has - pause and unpause still fixes it.
And agreed on your main point, if I'm home, and awake, I'm probably wearing my Max. I can only speak for my own head, as it's the only one I've tried, but I'm digging them. The foam pads seem to solve the "burning ears" problem I have with extended usage of leather headphones.
The spatial audio processing is done on the mobile device, not the headphones.
Which has made me seriously wonder if it's not actually about a gyro/accelerometer on the device, but did Apple just design the code to run specifically on certain A chips?
From the support page [1] for spatial audio, from the list of supported mobile devices you can basically deduce that it requires an A10 chip or later.
Which would explain why Intel Macs aren't supported. The only thing it doesn't explain is why the Apple TV 5th gen (4K) doesn't support it, which does have the A10. But I swear I'm holding out hope that a software update this year will bring spatial audio to the M1 Macs and the Apple TV 5th gen. I just for the life of me can't imagine why they wouldn't.
I often forget that I have them on, so actually never noticed a clamping force as a negative. But I like that they are staying nicely fixed to my head.
If you are not happy with how they feel I would send them back. Too much money for headphones you don't like to wear!
I'm using my Airpod Max since late December and the clamping force definetly gets better. However, I still have some issues wearing them with my reading glasses. But since I wear contact lenses most of the time, it's not really a problem.
I purchased the Sony WH-1000XM4 for $278, and the only thing I can complain about is that the name is hard to remember.
The comfort, sound quality, and ANC is just right. The price is a bit higher than I would have preferred, but didn’t find better choices at a cheaper price.
On the other hand I can’t see myself ever spending this much on headphones. I know there are people who can and will, but to me there’s nothing in that product to justify the price.
It also feels like any product Apple releases gets bonus review points (which I think is just confirmation bias), just because Apple made it.
Readit News
It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages.
Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk.
But because this was expensive and Apple supported it longer, it will have maybe lasted 10 years and one or two (pricey) battery replacements. This is still much worse than audiophile „analog“ headphones and I feel like this change is not adequately addressed.
I would really hope to see more approaches like Shure‘s „Aonic 215 True Wireless“ which is an arguably quite ugly attachment to the drivers that have been around for a long while and just adds the wireless capabilities and bluetooth. It can also be used for any other Shure driver afaik. This way you keep the good old sound producing piece while swapping out the stuff that will degrade over time.
I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it? Did your parents hand you down their headphones? Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs? So it maybe happened once? For a few people?
Let's calculate -- about 320 days a year * 14 hours a day * 19 years = 85k hours.
I think this represents about correctly how much time I spent with these.
I change pads, I open it every couple of years to clean dust and hair and I have fixed broken cable twice (by shortening and giving it new plug).
Other than that they still work perfectly.
But I've had my AKG K240's for years and they're tireless. Not suitable so much for running around town, but they've been made since the 70's nearly to the same spec. The cable is removable, so are the ear pads and both replaceable.
And they aren't even expensive, relatively speaking. Great for mixing and general listening. Can't say enough good about them, really. https://www.akg.com/Headphones/Professional%20Headphones/K24...
edit: My opinions are so very different from an article another user posted about the same (which strangely runs counter to the larger, repeated experience and sentiment). They've always been lauded for their very open, lively soundstage and even, clear response.
On the headphone side, the technology has gotten massively between in the last 30 years, so all my headphones are from the 1990s or later, but for speakers, tower/cabinet speakers from the 1970s are still functional and good.
My primary set of headphones were purchased new in 2007. It's been 13 years, and they still work perfectly fine. The amplifier they're plugged into was manufactured in 1976 and has had a set of NOS Sylvania Green Hornet tubes swapped in.
The company that makes those speakers has long since gone out of business, but they still work and sound out of this world. I think this stands in sharp contrast to some of the practices we see today, e.g. Sonos intentionally bricking their old speakers.
If I bought airpods today, they'd likely be useless within 5 years.
I have a quarter of century old Beyerdynamic cans that still sound fantastic. I am not seeing their end-of-life any time soon, except the pads are probably going to need a change.
I highly doubt these new headphones with non user replaceable batteries would survive 2 years of daily usage, that would be 2+ full cycles per day for the airpods, seeing how tiny the batteries are I don't think they'd perform very good after even a year
Personally, I used one pair of ath-m50x's for about ten years. I just replaced it with some Beyerdynamic's, which I expect to also last at least ten years.
All of the Bluetooth headphones and speakers I've bought have lasted less than a few years. Half the time the batteries fail (and often aren't user-replaceable), the other half it's some component I'm unable to diagnose myself.
My dad still has the headphones he bought in the 70's. He's replaced the pads and the cable.
Good audio equipment is built to be repaired and can last indefinitely when maintained.
Audio fidelity hit its stride decades ago. 40-50 year old stereos are still sought after, not because they look nice and are classic like a vintage car, but mostly because the sound quality is still excellent today.
They're also known as being pretty easy to fix, because you can find a replacement for virtually every part of them, and they're sold brand new to this day. Plenty of people that own this specific model have had them for more than a decade.
Anyway, my parents didn't pass me down a pair of HD 25s, but my pair (whose initial release is older than I am) is definitely going to be usable for my kids. Whether they'll want to use them or not remains to be seen.
The question is rarely the lifetime of the device. It's usually the lifetime of the interface. Or in this case, a headphone jack. 1/8", 1/4", etc... This is what normally gets obsoleted rather than the device itself. For headphones, the big switch is from wired to wireless. And I think that's where you'll see the shift. Yes, you can get a bluetooth adapter for traditional headphones, but they aren't great, and if you have audiophile wired headphones, you won't be happy with the sound. And so, the device won't be obsoleted because they fail, but rather the preferred interface changes to something that's incompatible. Maybe audio was lucky that there were adapters available for the first shift from 1/4" to 1/8"...
In this regard, I think the audio world is just catching up to their other brethren in the tech world.
AFAIK the turntable and cassette player have had some minor repairs but nothing else has needed maintenance since purchase.
I'm also currently listening to music through a pair of HD202s I bought in 2007 which have copped endless abuse.
I've also got the Meze Classic 99 and they're even more solid. At 3 years old, I've not had to change the cable nor the pads, infact I've also got a backup cable that cable with them. I could easily see them lasting decades if looked after carefully.
Not quite generational inheritance but I can't think of anything else I bought back then that I still use. It's pretty satisfying when I think about it.
I have pair of Monsoon Speakers bought since College (2000), so that's over 20 years. They still work great, just an headjack input, volume/bass control. Simple and they are connected to my PS4.
I have a dell monitor, bought in 2006, still working great with my mac. I bought an LG 4k one last year, and the Thubderbolt port just failed. Right now it is staying as a dead weight, and I am deciding if it is even worth fixing (or it can be fixed).
Some accessories do last decades. Apple accessories are made to last for 2-3 years and discarded after as they are not easily serviceable.
I still have the Koss headphones I bought in the early 1990's. They still work, though they need a 50¢ phono adapter to plug into current gear. Also, I had to send them back to Milwaukee twice to be repaired. But Koss did it for free both times under the "lifetime warranty" program.
Did your parents hand you down their headphones?
Yes.
Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs?
No, they didn't. Mostly because headphones weren't invented yet.
My sennheiser HD600 was released 17 years ago. I've tried many other headphones over the years but it's the best I've heard from my very subjective ears. I've also changed almost every part from it due to wear and tear and it's amazing the amount of after market part you can find both from sennheiser and other vendors directly on ebay
I recently moved to Bose NC700s because ya, wireless sure is nice, but I'd be surprised if they last 10 years, much less 20. Still have the HD's though and use them now and then.
I don't know that there's some grand tradition of handing down audio gear over generations, but the point is good audio equipment lasts a long time if the properly cared for. if it sounded good new, it probably sounds good years later too (except tubes, these are consumables). there's no reason why headphones should follow the obsolescence cycle of computers.
Companies should be rewarded when producing something that last. Externalities and disposal should be included in tax rate.
In many other contexts 25 years would be referred to a "generation" or a "lifetime", I think this is more pedantic than it is a generous interpretation of GPs point, which was that It's an enormous increase in e-waste.
I agree, they really are consumables. I had two pairs of regular AirPods. All of them barely last through a meeting now. It's not like I have used them intensively, some meetings every week, and for listening to podcasts when I am cycling.
Not only can a good wired headphone last you for many years, if you are not an audiophile, you can buy a reasonable Sennheiser for a fraction of the cost of the AirPods Max or even AirPods Pro.
The AirPods and AirPods Pro are great if you need something for on the go, but you have to factor in that you have to replace them every two years or so.
(I love the Pro's transparency mode for cycling. However, they are unusable for me when walking due to the 'thumping' sound that many others also suffer from.)
If there have been people passing headphones down to their kids, I bet that would be a lot smaller group than you are suggesting. A pastoral fantasy.
Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.
There is quite an active market for these and they are highly sought after because of their audiophile and build quality. Anyone who was fortunate enough to have inherited them likely for those reasons.
[1] https://www.koss.com/history
[2] https://overearmania.com/2019/01/19/akg-k240-monitor/
[3] https://www.headfonia.com/grado-sr80e-evolution/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_MDR-V6
https://www.cnet.com/news/does-sennheisers-iconic-1968-headp...
So that’s 3 generations of sennheisers. Some of those now being decades old, with only cables and leather pads being replaced every 5-10 years.
How many kids will want Dad's headphones from the 70s? Probably a few, but I would wager that for a lot of us, sifting through our parents' old hardware probably means a lot of figuring out what has sentimental value, what has actual use (e.g. even if I wanted to keep my folks' nice old record player, none of my music is on records and I'm not about to start buying physical media just because the player's there), and what's headed off to Goodwill.
It's nice to imagine a world where your re-padded headphones are still in use in 2070 when you're long in the cold ground, but that seems like a nostalgic fantasy more than reality for the vast majority of people and hardware.
Isn't it more of a question of how many lifetimes does it take for a pair of AirPods and their battery case to return to the dirt?
I have never, ever, ever known this to have happened. I’ve never once seen a 20+ year old set of headphones, let alone one that has been handed down through generations. That just silly talk.
Not to mention the fact that even if this had happened in a handful of times, the headphones would have outlived multiple cabinet sized sets of audio equipment, and several hundred pounds worth of record, 8 track, tape, and CD players - all of which wound up in a landfill somewhere. So you’ve reused the smallest component of all of that for what?
In the PR sense, yes. But it's disingenuous - they recycle (shred) reusable products.
2017 - Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and MacBooks
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...
2020 - Apple says it never ‘recycles’ old devices if they can still be used. Its lawsuit against a Canadian recycler suggests otherwise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
But I use headphones for two things: talking on the phone/listening to music when I walk my dogs or to pick up my kid, and for meetings at work (I'm long-term remote). Having cordless technology is nice for the former, where it replaced cheap wired earbuds that are always tangled in my pocket and never last for more than a year or so. It's critical for the second, so that I am not chained to my desk for the 1-2.5 hour meetings that I have multiple times a week. And I have to talk with my use cases, not just listen.
The heirloom-quality audiophile headphones are simply not workable for my use case, and I am sure that I am not alone here. And my father, who I am pretty sure did spend lots of time lying on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, did not ever pass his headphones down to me.
Have others had similar experiences with the airpods?
The Pros also had a design defect that led to a crackle. I had both my Pro earpieces replaced a few months back - independently, for that issue.
In any case, Airpods are meant to be disposable. Apple does not replace the batteries on them for battery service issues, you just get new ones.
The Maxes are different, the battery can be serviced, and it will last considerably longer - at about 5x the life per charge, you will likely exhaust the shelf life of the battery before it dies from usage.
I still have non-A2DP headsets (the early 2000s ones you see in movies) that pair perfectly with a modern laptop, and Bluetooth 1.x PDAs (~2003ish) that pairs correctly with a modern BT headset (in HSP profile, so audio quality is crap, but then again it's the best the PDA could do).
Battery is the much bigger problem.
Thankfully this isn't true, they've gotten a lot better! But I guess you mean it's still backwards compatible.
It's a big worry on the smaller AirPods, since those are almost 100% battery and glued together (and I'm not sure how you could build a product like that in a way that's both small and has a replaceable battery). For the big cans, you can pay $80USD to get the batteries replaced if the headphones are out of warranty (and, presumably, the warranty will cover the full cost of a battery replacement).
And yet I can't sync my phone with my car, or my headphones with my laptop.
Regular AirPods, which are not repairable AFAIK, are more affordable and widely used. But they are also very small, so even if people replaced them every 2-3 years, the amount of waste would be minuscule compared to their waste from takeout containers, food waste, and other refuse. I suppose you could also factor in the energy spent producing and shipping the units, but it's not as if repairable headphones (all of which are much larger than regular AirPods) don't also incur these costs when they are produced and repaired.
So while I agree that it would be great if we could have more repairable things, I'm not sure that this is an especially good example of a product that will meaningfully contribute to e-waste.
Sincerely asking here, but what do you see are the most significant negative externalities here? We're not exactly running out of landfill space anytime soon, and most landfills in the US are very careful to ensure waste doesn't pollute the surrounding environment.
Is it the greenhouse gas emissions? I'm curious how the total emissions on buying a pair of headphones every 2-5 years compares to other everyday activities like shipping my weekly usage of broccoli to the grocery store for me to eat.
Is it the concern of labor going to waste? Something else?
My Bose QC1s barely lasted 15 months (thank god for Amazon's godtier returns policies at the time).
Swore off Bose and got some Beyerdynamics. I think I did have some problems actually but I returned those and my current cans are ~6 years old IIRC
I like the Bose sports earbuds, seems like no one else has worked out that IEMs are a terrible idea for sports sigh though now I just use bone conduction
That's a pretty tiny market. It was also "you spend ten dollars at the grocery store for cheap Sony headphones or earbuds and then they break and then you do it again. Sound quality is terrible."
They did have fewer batteries, though, at least, in terms of the disposability problem.
So, Buy It For Life (and Hand It Down To Your Kids) strategy is elitist in the same way having the basic understanding of thermodynamics is - only a very small amount of people have and appreciate those ideas.
An adapter like that is yet another thing I need to put in my bag, and lacks at least some of the convenience that comes with having headphones that just wirelessly connect to my phone natively.
A bicycle could be passed down the generations but not an electric car. Lithium wears down, software stops being updated, parts stop being produced, etc.
That's the price you pay for feaures. Clunky wired 1970s headphones don't fit my use case which requires headphones to be compact and wireless. The same way my electric car outperforms a super-serviceable Model T.
Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.
But they _are_. By now I have seen many review videos that compare them with the typical audiophile/sound production headphones. E.g. Marques compared them with the Sennheiser HD800S [1].
> Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.
Does it not? If I can reuse the housing, the drivers, earpads, headband and just need to replace the battery when its dead, does this not reduce e-waste? Also I do not condemn wireless headphones in general, I said it is a shame that products which could be used for many decades in the past become e-waste rather quickly in today's world. And that I would prefer the approach Shure is taking to reduce waste and only replace the highly degrading components (at least with their monitors).
[1]: https://youtu.be/UdfSrJvqY_E?t=609
Use the crappy headphones that came bundled with the portable cassette player, which before too long broke or wore out, and buy another crappy pair because that's what you can afford. Or buy a new cassette player or portable CD player to replace what you had.
Waste from consumer products didn't start with blue tooth headphones.
https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2
Or the Print Plus 3D printable headphones.
https://www.print.plus/
Battery life is not great (a few hours), but it is a small addon which fits nicely into the headphones, and can be easily replaced when it breaks or dies.
Bluetooth and the integrated form factor is a risk, but I think that’s not a ten year concern. It would be nice if they had a physical port for the eventuality though.
Maybe a few people hand down usable audio equipment, but the only stereo equipment I got from my parents was an 8-track tape collection and a console stereo.
For you youngsters that don't know what that is, it's a stereo system (usually tuner + turntable + speakers, some of the more modern ones had a cassette player too) built into a piece of furniture the size of a dresser. My parents, being the audio connoisseurs they were, had an 8-track player that sat on top.
https://www.google.com/search?q=console+stereo&tbm=isch
If you don't actually "want" a pair of wireless headphones, then the AirPods Max aren't targeting you at all. Absolutely nobody should buy these if they don't intend to use them in wireless mode, there are better wired headphones available for less money.
That's an excellent point. No tech product can be a "BIFL" (Buy It For Life) product, but it'd be nice if all companies were as good as Apple at making their products recyclable, and making recycling easy.
[1] https://www.apple.com/environment/ [2] https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in
The only way forward I see is to make significant cuts to some of this really low-hanging fruit of single-use plastics (which also have other harms like environmental micro-plastics and inherently requiring fossil fuel use), maybe come up with better ways to recycle the aluminum and stainless steel in a product like these headphones, but most of all to move away from fossil fuels in the manufacturing chain and in the operation of landfills.
The cat is already out of the bag, people enjoy getting new toys like these and the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world have the disposable income to afford to buy products like this if they want to is amazing. I don't think talking up the good old days when disposable income was a lot more scarce and consumer goods were relatively much much more expensive is going to make much of a difference.
It still is. Good quality wired headphones are easily available and more affordable than ever.
planned obsolescence that leads to phones being upgraded every year or two, and barely working after 5 years, is so so wasteful.
Dead Comment
It's fairly well known that above the ~$100 price level, headphone sound quality differences mostly disappear once equalized properly [0]. The real test is not stock AirPods versus H9i (as done in the review), it's AirPods versus H9i once they're both equalized to a common frequency target. Otherwise you're testing the manufacturer's tuning as much as the actual quality of the hardware.
Certainly, there's something to be said for the manufacturer getting it right in the first place so you don't have to bother with EQ when listening on a mobile device, etc. But I think the following two points are likely true:
1) People will score the AirPods highly in subjective listening tests;
2) The performance in those listening tests has more to do with the frequency tuning of the AirPods than anything about its hardware, and you could get a virtually identical listening experience with a $100 to $200 pair of Sennheisers and an EQ app.
[0] See e.g. http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2017/02/twirt-337-predicting-h.... Sean Olive has a bunch of papers on this.
Why is it the most important part? As you said this is a main-stream headphone review.
From my experience, most consumers don't enjoy listening to music w/ a flat curve - if that is where you're going with this. I've sunk several thousand dollars into high-end gear, and even I don't want a flat curve. A flat curve is most useful if you are an audio engineer working in a studio. I'd much rather use different headphones for different kinds of music, than compromise and use a flat-curve which sounds incredibly boring (to me).
I would expect a frequency response graph and sound signature e.g. U, V, Harman etc.
This depends on your definition of "mostly disappear". If you mean, ignoring, soundstage, imaging, distortion, and other parameters that affect sound, then yes, but even a non-audiophile could easily discern the difference between an open-back vs. a closed-back headphone with identical magnitude response (by your definition, the differences between these two headphones should have mostly disappeared).
From linear signal analysis, magnitude adjustments do not provide enough degrees of freedom (and thus are not sufficient) to transform any response into another response. And this is true for practical sound signals not just theoretical concoctions.
Take a look at any headphone review at rtings.com where they try to capture other parameters in addition to magnitude response. They test for phase response (related to imaging), PRTF (pinna-related transfer function --- related to soundstage), and harmonic distortion. These would not automatically match between headphones that were modified by gain adjustments to have identical magnitude response.
What an uncharitable reading! They said the quality differences mostly disappear.
Shouldn't you test the how Apple tuned the Airpods max, since you can't change it's EQ?
The Music app also has an EQ but it's very primitive and hasn't changed since early iTunes.
There is so, so much subjectivity in headphone reviews, and so little science these days - if I had any interest in doing so whatsoever I would certainly start up my own review site, refuse to review headphones that were given to me by the companies themselves to assure a lack of bias, and - you know - actually do some science.
I, for one - would be interested in doing my own sets of frequency response data and comparing them to what these companies should be providing to start, and so often do not.
Ugh. Hybrid consumer/pro audio gear is the worst. >.<
As an aside, applying scientific principles doesn't automatically make the review any better. Science works by proposing a hypothesis/model and collecting data to see if the data matches the model. If your hypothesis/model is just average, and not world-class, then the most carefully collected data doesn't hold much weight/value.
For e.g. Minor changes in the sound signature/frequency response are only audible when you listen to the same music across multiple headphones, and that too when you're carefully listening. Also the sound signature can vary when the fit of the headphone changes as per the individual head shape/ear shape/etc. All this is assuming there is enough manufacturing tolerance to produce headphones with identical sound signatures, etc, etc.
Ultimately you'll have to come up with a hypothesis/model that is better than the current one. Which is not to say it can't be done, but its a tall order, but I hope you give it a shot at-least. If nothing else you'll have a cool blog post :)
But don't worry, there is a place for FFT graphs. rtings.com is excellent for reviews on audio and visual gear.
Here's their review on the airpod max: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/apple/airpods-max-...
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/apple/airpods-max-...
As a counterpoint to your #2, what proportion people using $100-$200 headphones equalize them properly?
This strikes me as similar to displays. Most people don't do any calibration, and reviewers tend to review both the monitor calibrated from factory and after their own custom calibration.
This seems absurd on its face and should really cause the researchers to re-evaluate their model. Just because their research shows people prefer a certain EQ doesn't mean there aren't any other benefits to better designed products, like soundstage, detail, clarity etc.
Do you have links to Sean's papers? There doesn't seem to be anything on his blog.
Google scholar will pick them up you type in "Sean Olive." For example: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=16486
If anyone reading this finds a free way to access the original papers, please comment.
The term "audiophile" has been permanently tarnished in my mind and sits in a corner of my brain next to homeopathy and EM sensitivity.
Here's a recent review I encountered while looking for something tangentially related: "These QED audio cables promote a wide-open soundstage, both vertically and horizontally. They help vocals sound full-bodied and weighty, but with lots of breathing space above them, too. Put simply, if you covet space and detail with sure but nimble footwork and heaps of insight, consider your search for an RCA audio cable complete."
> but their track record with audio hardware is inconsistent. Somehow, the company that makes the HomePod—a marvel of mono speaker engineering—is also the company that continues to make and sell Beats products.
When Beats were acquired by Apple. Especially with Jimmy Iovine in charge of Apple Music ( initially ). I was extremely worried that any of the crap Beats made infect Apple's Audio. Turns out Apple has Firewalled their department pretty well. I remember reading one of the story about HomePod team asking Jimmy Iovine's opinion on its audio quality. His reply was his usual " You need more Bass".
Apple audio engineering teams consist of many engineers from Bowers & Wilkins . One of my favourite brand in Audio Equipment. ( I think, I could be wrong, Steve Jobs likes Bowers & Wilkins too ) And you should notice their taste of Audio have many similar traits.
So Beats continue to make crap, they did improve somewhat since Apple's purchased them. And Apple, continues to be Apple.
But that is only with Audio, the AirPods Max Hardware Design is very much modern Apple and non-Bowers & Wilkins. The weight and comfort issues. Something about Apple's Design Department changed ever since Steve Jobs is not there to be the Editor to edit things. Things like Keyboard, TrackPad or Headsets. User Comfort and usage are no longer the 1st priority. Instead it is aesthetics and design goals, that could be material ( the need to use Metal ), thinner or colour.
Design is how it works, not how it looks. Hopefully recent Mac changes meant they learned a thing or two.
I like the weight of the Max headphones and how they feel premium rather than plastic, I also use them at my desk and don't think they're uncomfortable. The butterfly keyboard, and touchbar are post-jobs failures though, but we're almost done with them.
I guess my point is that there were mistakes during the Jobs era too, people just forget them.
> "Design is how it works, not how it looks."
It's both.
I respectfully disagree:
https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/31750-53575-magic-m...
The fact that the author thinks the HomePods have great sound rather makes me doubt his audiophile qualifications. I consistently have to listen to music at a much lower volume than I want because even at a moderate volume, the bass hurts my ears. Listening to classical is even more annoying, as everything is fine until some poor instrument wanders in to the HomePod's "BOOST THAT BASS" range and suddenly the balance is all wrong.
There's a HUGE bass boost. It's unlistenable to anyone familiar with what a relatively neutral frequency response should sound like.
I don't know what type of curve they are targeting with all of their auto-eq magic but if you're not going to make it user-adjustable, I don't know why you would choose a bass cannon.
Whether you like flat frequency response on a speaker that can power the low end is up to you, of course.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40530628/apple-homepod-frequency...https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_ho...
They don't, they make good headphones now. Nobody knows this because they don't listen to the products, have never listened to them, and rely on jokes they read on the internet 10 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams
I saw a great documentary about Rams, which was put online as free to watch - but for only a month or so. Not sure whether it was this one, but I think that it might be. There's a chance you might find it archived somewhere:
https://www.hustwit.com/rams/
Edit for spelling and to add that it's available on Amazon Prime (for me in the UK):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.38b698...
Another one which I like a lot are the range of mini amps from Laney. They aren't targeted for normal home use, but they can be used with bluetooth and aux-in. For their price and size, they sound very good. As a guitar amp...ehhh its OK for the price, but its portable.
Its really telling that both are veteran music gear companies.
My B&W PX headphones suggest that they have plenty of weight and comfort issues of their own. ;) Sennheiser Momentums were much more comfy, but didn't sound as good :|
Tom Holman is there as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomlinson_Holman
Although this is pure unproven (and maybe unprovable) speculation, I think that people buying such products have already decided to do so at some deep emotional level, and any half-decent review just provides the necessary rationalization for an otherwise excessive purchase.
Neither are terrible inconveniences but it’s a minor life improvement to not deal with those things. Is that worth $550? Not sure. But I’m glad I spent the money.
I think this is a generic Bluetooth audio chipset problem - I know it happens both with my Taotronics dongle and my PLT headphones. Bloody annoying when I'm listening to something on the phone, I've forgotten the Macbook is also connected, and bash beeps, killing the music.
These days there are many other aspects to using headphones, ie as you mention how things work over bluetooth. Or comfort (which alone would kill these for me, even if they would be properly great in everything else). Or various signalling with purchases.
Anyway as long as everybody is happy with what they have all is good.
Probably a niche case but Apple seems to cater to the 'hearing problems' niche, unlike the other manufacturers.
They sell products that work for 80% of people. I can't use the Apple mouse because it gives me wrist pain. My partner can't use Airpods because they hurt her ears. Their products work for some people, but if you're unlucky you can only go buy some other companies product.
It always struck me as odd, that despite all their focus on accessibility in software, they seem to ignore ergonomics for the most part. Probably because offering the smallest number of hardware models is more important to them than covering the whole market.
This was particularly bad for the original ear pods and normal AirPods (80% if I remember correctly), is much better for the AirPod pros with their exchangeable inner ear pieces (90%), and even better with the AirPod Max’s (95%).
Though if your ears are at the extreme end you’re out of luck. I guess it’s an unfair version of Darwin’s law... can’t really blame Apple for that though. Other headphone manufacturers don’t act differently in that regard.
Their H1 chipset line includes a fair number of products for different uses, ears and preferences.
AirPods Mark II, AirPods Pro w/ 3 separate tip sizes, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro which IIRC had 4 or 5 tip sizes in the box (would have to dig it out to check), the Beats Solo Pro and the 2020 Powerbeats.
Not all of these are good fits on me, and I’ve owned or tried most of them. Pretty sure the remainder of the Beats line sold today that I haven’t listed is still on the W1 which is still a decent enough chip, although I’ve found the H1 to have superior wireless performance in crowded downtown San Francisco where the W1 would have trouble maintaining a connection to my phone.
For all the headphones they sell, I think there are still some gaps in Apple’s lineup to fill and room for other products in the market. I don’t know what their plans are, but if they intend to remain contenders they probably are working on designs that you might like more, unlike say, the mouse, where they made Ive’s platonic ideal of a mouse and seemed to have called it a day, there is no range or differentiation: you can have a Magic Trackpad or you can have a Magic Mouse. I mean that’s fine, I’m happy with my Logitech mouse.
This is in the institutional DNA of Apple because it saved the company in the late nineties. Steve Jobs famously came in and canned dozens of Mac models, arguing that only four were needed: A pro desktop and a consumer desktop, a pro laptop and a consumer laptop. And that was that.
Apple is, what, a hundred times bigger today, but I don’t think the product design side of the company has really scaled up as much. I think they could afford to expand a bit.
Deleted Comment
If you shoot photos or video, you may be familiar with flat color profiles. RAW photos, or Log color profile videos. That flatness is important for professional work. But sometimes you want a JPG straight out of a Canon camera because their “color science” is gorgeous, and the photo doesn’t need much correction. Otherwise — fashion trends aside — an unprocessed RAW is dull.
At this price point, I feel like the Max’s are for people who want a quality fashion accessory that sounds amazing with little work. Kind of like the Bose speakers my dad splurged on when I was a kid. I’d later find out they were not considered great speakers. Did we care? No. They made movies fun, and brought my dad joy as he cleaned the house on Saturday’s blasting Led Zeppelin or some 80s New Wave cassette.
But for a professional tool, the author’s comparison to computational photography catches my eye. Because, despite buying every high-end iPhone for the camera system, I’m perennially frustrated. My DSLR smokes it, consistently. The computational stuff is impressive, but it still just doesn’t come close to reliably capturing quality shots the way my Canon does. But the “best camera is the one you have with you” — and when I’m out and about, I still appreciate having the lates-and-greatest iPhone camera system.
Anyway, long winded but my point isn’t to throw shade at the new Max’s. I haven’t tried them personally. I came close to buying them, but considered the back order and price and decided on some AirPod Pros - my first wireless ear buds. And I love them! They’re life changing for me because I can clean, and exercise, and turn on noise cancellation and get stuff done.
I think the bottom line is, if you love Apple stuff, don’t care about the price — or are excited to splurge on high end accessory — and you don’t do professional audio work, I get the impression that you’ll probably love these headphones. But professional audio engineers are probably going to still rely on monitors for serious work.
Especially due to the dynamic equalization of which OP speaks. You cannot have this when you are working with true sound (like you say with the photos: no professional camera should distort colours without you being able to control that).
They don't feel heavy at all, I love the physical design, music sounds great. I hope spatial sound comes to Apple TV, I find it kind of pointless to have spatial sound depending on the position of the iPad / iPhone, I'd rather have spatial sound encoded in the content I am listening to, for example when watching a movie.
In the beginning I thought that the case is bad, but I actually got used to it now. Compared to my Sony-XM3 case, this is a case I ACTUALLY USE. The only stupid thing is that the little hole/nudge in the case for charging doesn't align properly because I've adjusted the AirPods to my head. Oh well. That's really the only thing I can complain about, so that should tell you how f** great they are.
I often stick my ipad under my monitor, plug it in, and then pop the headphones on. The ipad doesn't move. It doesn't need to move - for the next two hours, it's a dongle, a very flat appletv.
Spatial audio still works like this. If I pause, look away, and unpause - where I was looking when I unpaused is the new centre. It's not depending on the ipad's position at all, just origin plus delta.
I get that the iphone/ipad need more than this, in-case the device is moving too. But it's not a hard requirement. If the device doesn't move (eg, my appletv hasn't moved for 3 years), then it doesn't need a gyro/mems to tell you it hasn't moved. I think you can safely assume my TV hasn't moved, and if it has - pause and unpause still fixes it.
And agreed on your main point, if I'm home, and awake, I'm probably wearing my Max. I can only speak for my own head, as it's the only one I've tried, but I'm digging them. The foam pads seem to solve the "burning ears" problem I have with extended usage of leather headphones.
Which has made me seriously wonder if it's not actually about a gyro/accelerometer on the device, but did Apple just design the code to run specifically on certain A chips?
From the support page [1] for spatial audio, from the list of supported mobile devices you can basically deduce that it requires an A10 chip or later.
Which would explain why Intel Macs aren't supported. The only thing it doesn't explain is why the Apple TV 5th gen (4K) doesn't support it, which does have the A10. But I swear I'm holding out hope that a software update this year will bring spatial audio to the M1 Macs and the Apple TV 5th gen. I just for the life of me can't imagine why they wouldn't.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211775
If you are not happy with how they feel I would send them back. Too much money for headphones you don't like to wear!
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/airpods-max-too-tight-o...
The comfort, sound quality, and ANC is just right. The price is a bit higher than I would have preferred, but didn’t find better choices at a cheaper price.
On the other hand I can’t see myself ever spending this much on headphones. I know there are people who can and will, but to me there’s nothing in that product to justify the price.
It also feels like any product Apple releases gets bonus review points (which I think is just confirmation bias), just because Apple made it.
Here, the missing frequency graphs:
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/apple/airpods-max-...
They use repeatable lab set up, retest per reader feedback, and share raw charts too.