You won’t see many Apple products in these pages, and for good reason. As Stereophile Editor Jim Austin wrote to me recently in an email, “Apple may have the best acousticdesign facilities in the world, but its products are designed by engineers who don’t seem to respect perfectionist sound—which is appropriate for a company that aims for the vast middle of the bell curve.” Has that changed?
It took Apple years to get halfway serious about music reproduction. The $2 trillion giant didn’t offer lossless files via its Apple Music streaming service until mid-2021. Its early wired earphones sounded tinny and congested, barely a step above free airplane buds. Later models were better, but not by much.
Then, starting with the iPhone 7 in 2016, Apple took away the headphone jack. People who were serious about sound and determined to keep listening “wired”—that is, not via a lossy Bluetooth connection—reluctantly purchased ugly, easily lost dongles-with-tails that spoiled their phones’ clean design. Meanwhile, the convenience-minded “good enough” crowd bought a billion1 wireless earbuds, all hampered by Bluetooth’s bandwidth limitations.
To this day, Apple treats even its best wireless listening devices like naughty stepchildren. Neither the $549 over-the-ear AirPods Max (which I auditioned for a few weeks in late 2021) nor the new AirPods Pro 2 in-ear monitors ($249; the product under review) support superior Bluetooth codecs like aptX HD and LDAC, much less hi-rez music. (See Jim Austin’s sidebar.) The company, for now at least, sticks to its own AAC codec, which, while better than basic SBC, isn’t as good as LDAC or aptX HD.2
The new Bluetooth 5.3 standard implemented in the Pro 2s can handle lossless streaming in conjunction with Qualcomm’s S5 chip, but Apple literally isn’t buying it (the chip that is), preferring its own silicon. This seems to rule out a Pro 2 firmware upgrade that unlocks CD-qualityor-better audio, unless that capability is hidden inside the new Apple H2 chip that drives these AirPods. That’s possible, but I shan’t hold my breath.
SPECIFICATIONS
Bluetooth wireless earbuds with noise cancellation. Model number MQD83AM/A. Volume
