A twofer post from me: an album… and HARDWARE impressions.
First the album; an Orchestral arrangement of all 25 Bond themes, no vocals:
And second; today is the launch day of the new AirPods Pro Generation 2. Keep in mind I’ve had them for… half a day, so these are very much first impressions
I got mine with my face on them!
These are interesting in that… they don’t reinvent the wheel… but improve on it.
Let’s start with sound. The H1 chip powering the AirPods and Beats line has had its first revision, the H2, which Apple claims has “better quality audio” (sadly, not lossless as rumored), “2x more powerful noise cancellation”, and not on the site but alleged in their presentation: better Atmos support.
If there is better Atmos support… it’s hard to tell. Heights seem a tad more defined, but overall everything (including Atmos) sounds just a bit more “natural”, and there’s a good reason for that. To explain, I’ll hand it over to Crinacle, who runs
In Ear Fidelity, the worlds largest publicly available IEM and headphone graphing and rating database:
The new drivers are tuned to a neutral target, which is my preferred sound signature for headphones! I always loved the first Gen for their ability to effectively “dissolve”. You forget you’re even wearing them. Now, not only do they “dissolve” but they sound so much more natural.
There’s a bunch of other Quality of Life upgrades too: the case now has a speaker and an AirTag built in for when you lose it, it can charge with an Apple Watch charging puck, and the stems can be stroked (
) for volume control.
I ultimately upgraded as my launch Gen 1’s had an issue that had an active recall that I had serviced once… and needed again (worth noting this only affected units made in Oct 2019), and was too lazy to do servicing again. If you don’t have AirPods Pro already it’s worth it. If you do… it’s probably worth it, but not a night and day difference.
The big test here is next weekend I have to fly to Alabama for my brothers wedding… I’ll be putting both the over-ear AirPods Max and these “2x more powerful noise cancelling” AirPods Pro to the test with cabin noise…