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Comment by goblin89 | Hacker News Reader

New AirPods Max finally have lossless wired audio, which is pretty nice and makes them finally catch up with the Pros.

Does anyone have experience with obtaining a flatter frequency response from any AirPods, though? While maintaining the full power of noise cancellation.

My experience with Pros has always been that they exaggerate the bass. EQ settings available in Music are coarse, and I don’t know of any other way to control frequency response independently of the app that plays the sound.

I know they are not really best for critical audio work, but they are damn convenient.

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Apple added wired lossless audio last year when they moved to USB-C iirc

I see, I remember checking that they didn’t support high definition wireless codec but missed the part where they could do lossless over the wire last year.

Why can’t they squeeze in that codec, considering Pros have it for years and are a lot smaller?

Edit: apparently I was confusing AirPods Pros with Sony WH models, which have LDAC. I guess there is no chance Apple adopts LDAC, even in their large heavy cans.

LDAC is also not lossless btw.

At nearly 1000 kbps I think it is close enough for my ear.

Based on the wording AirPods Max 2 looks to have the same limitation as AirPods Max (USB C) where using the wired audio means the mic is not usable.

Really quite annoying from the "damn convenient" aspect as well.

> My experience with Pros has always been that they exaggerate the bass

Based on my experience, almost all consumer-grade headphones (in ear and headphones) seem to suffer from this, I'm guessing people tend to prefer bass-heavy over "not enough bass". Not until you start looking at headphones meant for studio-use does it seem to get closer to expected when it comes to the bass.

If you're using Android there's global eq available (mostly). I use an app called wavelet that lets you search for your headphone model and download a pre-made profile.

iPhone users are kinda out of luck, but the autoeq database can show you how to set Music's equalizer to approximate a flat response

Research by Harmon suggests almost everyone, musicians and pros included, prefers exaggerated lows and highs over flat response. Check the "Harmon Curve"

And there is certainly a way for you to set system wide eq, see what AutoEq recommends.

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