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Call quality (outdoors / AirPods Pro): What's your Experience?
- Thread starter orschinger
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Is this is a noisy or quiet environment?
I’ve found when there’s background noise, ANC helps both the recipients & my own hearing.
While the speaker sound quality is excellent (when listening to music, for example), I too have had many complaints that the quality of voice calls I make is terrible. People routinely ask me to change to my old $10 wired headphones. This does not happen when I am speaking from, say, my office where there is absolutely no background noise, but otherwise, for some reason my super expensive Airpods Pro are failing me in most other instances. This is very unfortunate as I otherwise love them. Am wondering if somehow bought a "lemon". Any advice will be appreciated.
the only hope is a firmware update that definetely improve the situation.
nobody knows when (and above all) IF this will happen, because Apple didn’t recognize this issue so far.
I've been having the same problem. Piss poor call and recording quality when you're in a noisy environment. The ambient sounds are picked up much more than your own voice. I've had the pods swapped out once at the apple store- to no avail. Went back in the same day and the manager put a stop to more exchanges, saying there's a limit for each customer (news to me) and that he's confident that it's not the buds. And that the best I can hope for is a software update at some point in time. I'd love to know if this problem is present with all the buds, or if it's just some batches that have this issue. There seems to be a guy on YouTube who tested his buds in a noisy environment and found really good performance- makes me so confused.
As far as I know there’s no faulty batches. I’ve changed mine 3 times and the result is the same.
I’m currently giving feedback to Apple engeneers, will have A talk next week.
In non noisy ambient they are ok (but the original AirPods do far better), in noisy environment it’s muffled as hell.
honestly I think that a sw update won’t be released soon.
I too experienced this the other day while trying to use them on the tram, my gf heard everyone else and ambient noise alot better vs. my voice. This is a real bummer and something I havent noticed until now because I as well have only used the mic in calm/office environment the last 3w or so. What baffles me most is people saying the 1st and 2nd gens are alot better in this aspect. Makes you wonder if they totally forgot this on the APPs...
There are different experiences with the call quality – cause seems to be a defect concerning the inward-micro. That ist discussed here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ne.2208392/page-8?post=28052817#post-28052817
Thesis: the defect of inward micro causes that the outward noises and inward (your voice) may not be differentiated. Verification is the "Pass"test (sealtest - preferences-bluetooth-APpro-…). It fails not only if the seal is not good but also when the inward-micro is defect.
Thesis: the defect of inward micro causes that the outward noises and inward (your voice) may not be differentiated. Verification is the "Pass"test (sealtest - preferences-bluetooth-APpro-…). It fails not only if the seal is not good but also when the inward-micro is defect.
There may be other cases – since my second exchange APpro fail the seal-test, I not only hear the inner noice (like walking-thump) but also when having phone-conversations: my own voice is humming (with intact inward micro filtered out) and on the other side of the phone its said that the quality is bad in louder environments.
I’ve just tried to test the single mic instead of “automatic” and on the first it looks like forcing the use of the right improve the quality. Then I sent a vocal message via WhatsApp and it was a mess.
enabled again to automatic and all come back to “normal”.
tomorrow I’ll share with you some audio recording in different situation just to have some benchmarks with yours.
enabled again to automatic and all come back to “normal”.
tomorrow I’ll share with you some audio recording in different situation just to have some benchmarks with yours.
Quite strange because this morning I tried mine while on the bike, in a windy morning, and on the other side my voice was crisp and loud. ??♂️
For reference, here's mine:
From further examining, I'm starting to notice that the problem is much more apparent when you have lower frequency sound in the background- think a fountain, or traffic. I've tried recording with music blasting from iPad speakers for instance, and the recording is alright. I try the same next to a fountain- and my voice is all but gone.
From further examining, I'm starting to notice that the problem is much more apparent when you have lower frequency sound in the background- think a fountain, or traffic. I've tried recording with music blasting from iPad speakers for instance, and the recording is alright. I try the same next to a fountain- and my voice is all but gone.
That goes with my experience as well, the person on the other side when trying to speak through APPs on a tram cant hear my voice at all. Is the ANC connected to this problem somehow?
I do get feedback that people cannot hear me when using the Pros in noisy environment. Not so with AirPods 2, earpiece, or even speaker. This is a major problem for me - mine are going back.
There are zero issues with call quality on functioning AirPods Pro. They’re widely regarded as class leading in this aspect. I’ve had no problem since the first firmware.
That statement is just not correct, given this thread, and the multitude of others on this, other forums and Reddit.
If Apple hasn’t acknowledged it and fixed it it means it’s not happening in percentages high enough to action.
Thanks a lot man.
So I, & hundreds of thousands of AirPods Pro owners are idiots...
Key word is “functioning”.
If they’re working as intended, then call quality isn’t an issue.
Clearly they’re NOT working as intended for some here & they need to get theirs looked at.
I'm glad they're working fine for you!
As for me, they are not working as they should, despite exchanging them a few times. As soon as I'm outdoors and there is any external noise like wind or cars, they are simply useless; more or less 100% of people I've tried talking to complains about the difficulty in hearing me. And this is not because I ask them about how I sound, but rather that they on their own mention that they cannot hear me and normally the call ends with having to hang up since they cannot hear me. Or, if I can, I can stop walking, and try to shield my head/ears from external sounds/wind and things are decent.
On Apple's forums, there's a long thread about this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250813242
Look at the last page(s) and it's obvious that at least for some users, there is something fundamentally wrong with the Pros. Since exchanging them won't work, but apparently some other users have no issues, I'd suspect that there is something user-dependent going on. Perhaps certain ear shapes make the attempts at cancelling outside noise for better mic quality goes wrong?