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Comment by VladVladikoff | Hacker News Reader

AirPods themselves aren’t really that great from an audiophile perspective. The only part I like about them is the integration with the Apple ecosystem. This is a fun project and cudos to whoever pulled it off, but I fail to see the motivation.

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Airpods may not be "great from an audiophile perspective", but their sound is decent and they are actually well designed headphones. They are remarkably unremarkable. They have good (the new Pros even great) ANC. Their controls are intuitive and well thought out. It's hard for me to believe that I'm promoting an Apple product here, but they are what people often claim other Apple products to be – which I found to be BS for these other products. Someone sensible actually put thought into the product.

AirPods are widely appreciated in audiophile communities. Especially with some EQ applied, which is easy and common these days and easy to find for AirPods.

They're never going to appeal to the audiophile communities that pride themselves on being different and/or expensive above all else, but they're actually good hardware with decent out of the box tuning. Apply some EQ on top if you so desire and they're very good.

I am an audiophile, and for me the AirPods Pro replaced literally thousands of dollars of portable headphones, amplifiers, etc., which I don't miss a bit. Apple's audio engineering is truly top-notch, and all the convenience features are icing on the cake.

I actually really like the airpod pros from an audio standpoint. I find that a lot of wireless earbuds are way too heavy on the bass compared to the airpod pro.

My thoughts exactly, what I’d rather have is the ability to integrate other stuff into Apple’s ecosystem (most notably my hearing aids, which despite being MFi can only really stream audio from my phone—I had a pair of Beats headphones a few years ago and the ease with which I could switch them between phone, iPad and Mac was so wonderful and I’d like to be able to do that with my HAs as well.

"Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment."

AirPods makes it easier to listen to music across multiple devices. They sound reasonable enough for people to enjoy their music. They enable people to enjoy their music. This is why they are so popular.

They are ludicrously expensive for what they do. They have an apple logo on the box.

I'm not an apple person so this surprised me. I guess I have fallen for the "apple gear is expensive and must be the best" fallacy.

What are good options for similar wireless bud headphones?

The sony earbuds are about the best I’ve had for sound quality and noise cancellation. Much better than AirPods, but not nearly as nice integration with the Apple ecosystem.

I find AirPods Pro 2 to be “good enough” where I gave away my set of XMs to someone who will actually use them.

Call (mic) quality in AirPods is better as well, if that matters at all to you. At least that’s what folks on the remote end of calls told me.

I got the InZone gaming buds version which are supposedly very similar to Sony's WF-1000XM5 (https://electronics.sony.com/audio/gaming-audio/all-inzone-h...) I wanted to try out the higher-end wireless Bluetooth LE Audio and their USB-C transceiver, and I wanted something that would let me side-step the Bluetooth stack on my Steam Deck (AirPods are horrible and get lag on Deck after 30 mins; that one is Apple's fault), but even in the best case I find Bluetooth on the Deck is annoying.

I would say the sound is great and overall better than AirPods Pro 3 when I compare the AirPods and InZone buds playing Spotify Lossless content from my iPhone, but the sound is not to my taste. Not sure how much of the quality comes from the LE audio vs better sound hardware engineering. They sound more detailed in vocals, mids, highs, but are a little warm and muddy in the lows. I can't get the sound profile to match my AirPod Pros 3 or my Kef bookshelf speakers with EQ, but I didn't try very hard. The left bud also sometimes takes a bit longer turn on once I put them in my ears, up to 30 seconds before it starts playing audio.

AirPod Pros 3 are ahead in noise cancelling, transparency, and touch controls -- the InZone buds use long touch vs short touch for volume up/down which is confusing, it's much easier to increase the volume and harder to decrease it. AirPods win out for convenience when using with Apple hardware also since I have to use the USB-C dongle since Apple hardware doesn't support Bluetooth LE Audio / whatever the codec is.

Overall I'm happy with the purchase -- they do a great job as Steam Deck headset use case.

I want to try out the new WF-1000XM6 as well, which seem to review better than the WF-1000XM5, but don't have any friends with them yet.

I would not recommend wireless Sony earphones or headphones. I’ve owned three different models and in all of them the batteries failed after a few years. Check out the reviews there is an abnormal amount of failures. My conclusion is that while Sony is great at many things, they can’t do wireless headphones or earphones well and I steer clear.

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