AirPods sound quality is crap in calls | Hacker News Reader

AirPods sound quality is crap in calls

airpods.wtf

3 pointsmorajabi4 comments

I <3 AirPods and have used them for the past 3 years. But the sound and voice quality are crap when you use them as both your input and output device in calls. AKA, when the microphone is in use.

I'm cofounder of Noor —a voice chat app— and had to tell this to EVERY single new user, and they all were amazed. So we made a website you can link to whenever you hear someone using AirPods on a Zoom call.

Is this the exactly same issue that happens with every other Bluetooth headset too, or something worse?

Worse since they're expensive and pushed by the manufacturer to the point you cannot physically plug a 3.5mm male plug into a female adapter on the newer phones -- you are forced to buy a dongle.

Meanwhile the intelligence agencies of the world siphon up signals like hungry hungry hippos because SDRs are cheap and ubiquitious, when ten-ish years ago they were poorly documented, expensive, and the encryption schemes used strong enough using 4g over wifi was a very practical security decision.

Here's an old talk that references someone's deadname with good technical information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU8hg4FTm0g|

And a more recent talk on similar subjects:

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6249_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412271... |

https://berlin.ccc.de/~tobias/31c3-ss7-locate-track-manipula...

(Apologies to Kristin, if they see this: I had trouble locating JUST the slides, not audio or video, of the DC18 talk or I would have simply linked the slides.)

True. We mention this on the website too. But many people switched to bluetooth headsets because of AirPods thinking they are flawless — to my surprise even tech-savvy people, founders and engineers in meetings. The goal was to have a URL to send to them so they can test for themselves as some didn't believe or know what's the issue.

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