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I’ve been an Apple guy since my studio days, as Mac was the only platform that supported ProTools Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). That was in the 90s, and it was definitely a love/hate relationship largely due to the intricacies of the Mac OS prior to OSX. It was equal parts blind tech-drill and computer voodoo keeping it running day-to-day, but it was what I knew and liked it because didn’t realize how much better it could be.

There has been a similar path with Apple’s Airpods. I liked the early versions for the convenience and superior performance compared to other products in the space. I looked past the poor fit in the old ear canal and the tendency to fall out, lost forever, into the grass while mowing the lawn. I loved them…right up until I bought the next version and stuffed the old ones into the glovebox for all eternity.

With the release of the Airpods Pro a couple years ago, I saw the opportunity to resolve the fit problem as they now had a soft silicone tip (in 3 sizes) that provided a substantially better seal in the ear canal. Bass stayed in, room noise stayed out. And what…active noise cancellation as well? This was a game-changer! I’d tested out some Bose units with this feature a couple years back and wasn’t that impressed, but I was blown away at how well it was implemented on the Pros.

Active noise cancellation isn’t just masking the sound;  it involves a microphone monitoring incoming soundwave at your ear, and then producing the exact opposite soundwave out of the speaker pointed towards your eardrum. The result is that the incoming sound is nullified. And, all this can be done while at the same time playing whatever music you happen to be listening to. The benefits are numerous. Once unwanted noise is removed it is possible to listen to music at much lower (and healthier for your hearing) levels. One of my daughters finds it hard to concentrate on schoolwork in a room full of pencil-chewers, gum-poppers, finger-tappers, and snot-sniffers, so she will often just use her iPod Pros to reduce the clamor to its least annoying level.  I often use them in high sound level environments, like mowing the lawn or using power tools. Haven’t tried them at the gun range yet; not sure they would have the amplitude to compensate for that level of sound, but I may experiment!

So they sound great, fit better in the ear, cancel noise, as well as work amazingly as part of the Apple ‘experience’. Handing-off calls, managing playback, etc. Long list of intuitive features that you kind-of expect from Apple but don’t fully appreciate until you use something else. I was happy, but then one night I put the charging case on the third-party mag charger on my nightstand, and Poof!  They were done. Not sure what happened, but they would no longer hold a charge.

At Costco the next day I discovered the Pro 2 version had been released for a mere $50 more, so I was all in. I hadn’t done any research or heard about any improvements over the previous version, but it had to be better, right? Yes, right! Better in every way! First of all, four sizes of silicone tips to choose from. I didn’t have many complaints from the first version, but it does help dial it in even further. And what about the sound? Substantially better.  I mean a LOT. There is a space and clarity that I have only experienced in really good/great stereo speaker set-ups. I ran across an article interviewing one of the Apple engineers who worked on this release, and he mentioned that one of the major design breakthroughs was managing airflow through the unit. Not sure what that means, but I will say that you can almost hear the air in music. Not sure how else to describe it. Almost like layers you can discern in the mix.

Better fit? Check. Better sound? Double-check. What about noise cancellation? Much better as well, along with better microphone functionality in phone calls.

With the constant media barrage pushing us to the latest/greatest version of whatever widget they are selling, it’s hard not to get a little jaded. Personally, I’m not even tempted by the latest iPhone seduction anymore.  But I find the Apple Airpods Pro 2 to be an order of magnitude better than past offerings. And they fill well in a stocking.

There have been many unexpected results from the COVID lockdowns, but one that would qualify as a silver lining, at least from my perspective, is that millions and millions of people who ordinarily would have had meetings face to face were forced to meet using Zoom (or other) technologies and learned first-hand about the effects of small room acoustics. Noisy, echoey, and difficult to understand speech about describes it. This is because when someone speaks in a small room, the sound doesn’t just go to the microphone…it also moves toward the walls, floor, ceiling, tabletop, etc., and then bounces off and onward to the next hard surface; each delayed in time just a bit due to the extra distance traveled. This continues until the sound energy has dissipated enough to fade away. Like a stone thrown into a pond, but in three dimensions. It’s audio carnage.

Strangely, if a person were to take the place of the microphone in this same room and listen to the same person speak, they would not perceive it at all them same way. This is because our brain has the ability to sort out all these sound waves (called early reflections) bouncing off surfaces and competing with the original sound wave. In fact, our brain is HIGHLY attuned to these delays.. so much so that this is how we are able to determine the direction and distance from which a sound is coming. This is a function of our ear structure as well as having one ear on each side or our head. The little computer microphone doesn’t have these advantages*, so listeners at the other end just get a mash-up of all the sound bouncing around the room with different timings and loudness levels.

So why do some Zoom meetings sound worse than others? Well, there could be several contributing factors, but the primary culprit is frequently room size. The smaller the room, the closer the reflective surfaces for sound to careen off of. Sound energy falls off predictably (with some atmospheric variables) over time, because the speed of sound is a constant (again with some atmospheric variables), and decays to roughly half its energy for every doubling of distance. So a larger room, while subject to the same early reflections as the small room, will be much less affected by them since they will have lost much of their energy by the time they travel to a distant wall and bounce back.

Another consideration would be the delayed arrival of the reflected sound. Early reflections arriving at our ear delayed by less than 30 milliseconds (ms) or so are not perceived as a discreet echo, but rather as a tonal shift or even a “thickening” of the original.. Back in my recording engineer days I used this intentionally as a technique applied to main vocals or solo instruments to make them “pop” in a mix. My go-to move was to create two copies of the main track in ProTools (a digital audio workstation), delay one 8ms and one 15ms, pan them hard left/right, and apply a slight pitch shift up/down to each. But that’s another story… back to early reflections. Delays greater than 30-35ms are heard as a second iteration of the original, or an echo. Most small rooms will have at a minimum 6 parallel surface (wall, ceiling, and floor) all close enough to each other so the spoken word bounces back and forth between these parallel planes, and since the distance is short, they contain enough energy to make the trip many times before they dissipate into irrelevance. For each set of parallel planes. No wonder it’s a mess.

To further complicate matters, there are first, second, third, and to some degree forth order reflections to contend with. This refers to the number of surfaces encountered from source to microphone or ear. So far we’ve mostly been talking about the first order variety where angle of incidence equals angle of reflection (now, was that high school trig or middle school science?), but all the other angles come into play as well. Imagine if the room were covered with mirrors. How many ways could shine light on the computer microphone with a laser pointer? Probably more than four, but sound waves dissipate faster than laser light.

So that’s the conundrum. In part II we’ll take a looks at some solutions.

*On an interesting side-note, there have been many advocates in the recording community of what is generally referred to a ‘binaural recording’. This frequently takes shape as a human head constructed from a non-resonant material with two microphone places where human ears would be located.