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Comment by willyyr | Hacker News Reader

Since you mentioned: "be on a conference call". There is nothing more annoying then a participant in a conference call (or any call) using AirPods especially when they are at a busy place. My experience is that you hear everything around them and most of the time they are hard to understand because of how the voice is picked up. I always ask them to switch back to the phone so i can understand. Not sure if the new version improves that or if it's just my experience.

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Yep, I own AirPods and they are terrible when walking around town. Every person I talk to has commented on it. Which never happened with the regular wired ones.

I still enjoy them for music. But the battery life alone for calls is weak — I only get about 1 hour of talk time.

>walking around town

You don't want to walk around the town with earphones that isolate too much. My coworker was hit by a car as he was jogging while wearing IEMs. He couldn't hear the car horn and he was hit by a driver who couldn't stop his car in time. He didn't suffer any major injuries but he learned his lesson and now only jogs with open earphones.

That’s why I wear AirPods, because they don’t isolate inbound noise.

I’m talking about external background noise that the mic picks up.

I find that interesting. I often talk on my airpods while driving, and have done so in both of my cars. One has incredibly loud road noise (like I think there is a problem), and the other has no A/C and I live in the south--so, windows open.

In both cases I have received no complaints, and have even inquired about how the noise is recently. People can't hear my obnoxiously loud road noise at all, it gets canceled out.

This is definitely true, but it's a terrible idea to be on a conference call in a busy place anyway. It's incredibly obnoxious for everyone around one. My use case is just sitting in my relatively quiet office; without headphones the person in the next office over can hear everything, with any other headphones there are annoying wires and such.

Not really the Airpods fault there.

Sure it is, most phones have outstanding ambient noise cancellation, something that AirPods does not seem to have.

Ambient noise cancellation is not the same thing. Most headphones do it passively by having a closed-back design. It blocks noise from reaching your ears, not the microphone.

Active noise cancellation is not the same thing either. See https://krisp.ai/ for what you really need, and this is not something best done at the physical device level.

Pretty sure they're referring to ambient noise cancellation using the microphones to make it so the background noise doesn't come through your microphone to the other participants while on a call.

I'd argue it is -- my earbuds stick the mic right near my mouth, and I can hold it nearer if needed. Not so with airpods?

Airpods are much worse than Earpods for conference calling, no matter what the situation.

Maybe there are some headphones with better ambient noice cancellation, but AirPods don't seem any worse than the wired headphones I've used until this point. I just stopped doing conference calls at Starbucks or I go outside where noise cancellation works a lot better.

When I got hired for my current job I did both interviews from the parking lot of a local Starbucks for exactly this reason.

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