Apple AirPods Pro 2 - Life changing with an audiogram!
Practically perfect in every way
Most of my earbuds and headphones are Bose. I know they are not audiophile worthy and are not always even great, but my hearing is not really good enough to tell the difference. I like Bose stuff because of the warm sound, the always great comfort and good reliability.
In the past I’ve used the Apple EarPods and even the older in-ear headphones they sold in the mid-2000s, but neither were all that good.
I had never tried any of the newer AirPods, regular or Pro, because I was happy with my collection of Bose gear and I kept hearing complaints about the Apple stuff not having enough bass and otherwise worse sound than Bose.
So with all that in mind, I picked up the AirPods Pro 2 back in October. I didn’t really have a good pair of in-ear noise cancelling buds and had been hearing good things about the AirPods Pro 2 so when Amazon offered them at a discount, I snagged them, figuring I’d just return them if I hated them.
Well, I certainly don’t hate them. I love them! In fact, since I received the AirPods Pro 2 I have almost completely stopped using all of my other earbuds or headphones!
What’s to love? Everything so far:
The case is small and fits easily into my pocket. The case for my Bose SoundSports are like 3-4x bigger.
They fit really well and the ear fit test built into iOS makes sure you have a good seal for the best sound. I’m using large tips for both left/right.
The sound is at least as good as my Bose earbuds and headphones. There is plenty of bass for me.
I much prefer the stem for controlling them. Squeezing the AirPods to play/pause/skip is much easier and more reliable than tapping on an ear bud in my ear. The volume swiping also works great.
Transparency mode is a game-changer for me. Being able to pause music and then clearly hear what is going on around me is amazing.
But, by far, the #1 thing for me is the hearing assistive features. I used the Mimi hearing app to take a hearing test and generate a hearing profile (I have slight high-end hearing loss). I then was able to apply this hearing profile (aka audiogram) to the AirPods and the sound got even better! I also turned on other settings to make sounds clearer in transparency mode.
Now I sometimes put these AirPods on with just transparency mode and use them to hear things from across the room or to better understand conversations.
Great job, Apple!