AirPods Pro 2: crackling-like noise (rare, but also not rare depending on what you do)

[msackey]

I was doing some gardening working today and noticed that there is a particular action I do (using weed whacker, but more details below) will create a crackling sound when noise cancelling is turned on. I've never heard this sound before and I don't think this is my AirPods Pro 2 going defective, but rather how it is doing its noise cancellation.

Anyone has experience with this?

Details about weed whacking: so it isn't all weed whacking sounds that will create this crackling sound. I was using my weed whacker in an unconventional way, using it to chop up leaves and pine needles, basically to mulch them. It's when the nylon strong hits something hard (like a rock, the side of the yard waste bin continuously) that this crackling sound occurs.

You might ask why is the nylon string continuously hitting something hard. I was mulching leaves in a yard waste bin but I also later decided there was a better way to do this without eating up the nylon string

Anyhow, anyone experience this crackling sound in these conditions?

 

[waw74]

active noise cancelling (ANC) works by creating opposite sound waves to the sound coming in. so the peaks of the outside sound wave line up with the troughs of the inside sound wave.

So the AirPods have to hear the noise, figure out what the opposite or that noise, and then produce that loud enough to cancel out the outside noise. They also have to mix your music into that sound.

So very loud, or very quick noises (a gun shot is an example of both) are hard for it to be fast or loud enough to cancel out. Quieter and slow or steady noises are easier to cover, like airplane hum, or even voices.

ANC is not good for hearing protection in loud envionments, it's recommend to get a PNC (passive noise canceling) headset, which is more like traditional over ear hearing protection, but with a microphone and speaker combo to let in outside sound. Since all the sound making it to your ears in a PNC system go though the electronics, it's easy to limit, or block what gets in.

So very likely, you were hearing the first "slap" of the sting hitting the rock, and then the aipods canceled the remainder out. it's also possible, that each slap ended almost as quickly as it started, the AirPods were still canceling the noise for a brief moment after the sound actually ended, so you were hearing the "opposite sound" without the "regular sound" to cancel it out.

 

[msackey]

Thanks for the explanation. It's very informative. Luckily the sounds of the weed whacker are not that bad. It's an electric one so relatively quiet compared to gas ones.