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Apple AirPods Max Review (Noise Cancelling Headphone)

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amirm

amirm

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One note about tonality: if you are going to boost bass to comply with Harman curve, then you need to make sure the upper frequencies are there as well. Without that, the headphone will sound overwhelming bass heavy sounding. With Dan Clark, Audeze headphones, the bass is much lower by default so it doesn't come across the same way as the Airpods Max.
 

Frank Dernie

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Probably better to use foam earplugs for protection, no? Works full-spectrum.
I am not needing silence just enough cancellation to be able to hear music.
The alternative has always been nothing, but I fancied listening to music whilst mowing and noise cancellation gives a zillion times better sound than non-noise cancelling though I haven't tried the Etymotics I have used for decades on 'planes because are wired so inconvenient on the mower using a phone as source.
 

restorer-john

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...but I fancied listening to music whilst mowing...

I wear ~30dB in-ear protectors and another pair of industrial earmuffs over the top of my ears when mowing/gardening. It's amazing how you can hear the intricacies/flaws of the various motors/engines with all that attenuation- but you'd know all that Frank.

(Brush cutters, various mowers, leaf blowers, chain saws). The most beautiful sounding and quiet small engined power tool I have, is a Honda straight shaft 4 stroke brush-cutter, followed by a Mitsubishi 2 stroke trimmer. The Briggs and Strattons, Tecumseh and Stihls are as rough as guts, but you can't kill them.
 
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Merkurio

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One note about tonality: if you are going to boost bass to comply with Harman curve, then you need to make sure the upper frequencies are there as well. Without that, the headphone will sound overwhelming bass heavy sounding. With Dan Clark, Audeze headphones, the bass is much lower by default so it doesn't come across the same way as the Airpods Max.

The last time I tried them, I found the upper-midrange recessed (not Audeze levels, but still) and actually a nice treble response, somewhat sparkly but not overdone and definitely not shadowed by the bass response, which is most sub-bass focused as your measurements exhibit (it even raises past <50 Hz).

Again, all of this with enough volume from an iDevice (I tend to listen loud, admittedly), but I don't pretend to be the voice of truth, far from it, just to show how the perception of sound changes from everyone, depending on the conditions and reference points.

In fact, I'm not even interested in buying them at the moment, I would like an improved version in the future, preserving the technical attributes but correcting aspects such as compatibility with high resolution codecs, condensation problems or the charging bra.
 

JJB70

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I wear ~30dB in-ear protectors and another pair of industrial earmuffs over the top of my ears when mowing/gardening. It's amazing how you can hear the intricacies/flaws of the various motors with all that attenutation- but you'd know all that Frank.

(Brush cutters, various mowers, leaf blowers, chain saws). The most beautiful sounding and quiet small engined power tool I have, is a Honda straight shaft 4 stroke brush-cutter, followed by a Mitsubishi 2 stroke trimmer. The Briggs and Strattons, Tecumseh and Stihls are as rough as guts, but you can't kill them.

It's amazing what you can discern from listening to engines. In my years working in ships engine rooms I generally had a better idea of how the engines were doing by walking around using my ears and sense of feel than I did from staring at screens (though clearly the instrumentation was essential for some parameters). It's easy to underestimate human senses, for things like vibration and surface finish our senses are pretty powerful. A regular routine was to condition monitor moving contact bearings and after checking the accelerometer readings used the old stethoscope to listen to them which told me as much as the accelerometers.
 

GaryH

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In so far as where the front volume vent departs from the front volume it's more or less centred
An asymmetry is an asymmetry.

I believe that it uses a 711 coupler for a start.
But I could say the same about Amir's or to a slightly lesser extent Oratory1990's EQ profiles, or autoEQ profiles derived from various measurements. They make the APM sound more different from my K371 than less to me, particularly because of excess gain in the ear canal gain region after EQ (2-3kHz in particular).
Not that I wouldn't want to EQ the APM, far from it, but more specifically past 3.5kHz (4kHz for a start - but not by 8dB). Same applies to the K371 BTW :D.

The HMS II HATS Rtings use shows poor adherence to IEC and ITU standards in the treble compared to the GRAS KEMAR Oratory uses for most of his recent measurements:

index.php


Jaakko Pasanen of AutoEQ did an analysis of a few amateur headphone measurement sites and Rtings came second to last in terms of accuracy to professional measurements from Oratory:

ia8BZEN.png


The fact that you find similar discrepencies with the AKG K371 as the APM strongly suggests in both cases that as I said before this is just down to response variation on different heads (mirrored by small variation in clamping pressure on different rigs), as this is a known issue with the K371.
 

okok

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lowest distortion hp ever, propely since, since anyone can recall
 

staticV3

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Merkurio

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In the grand scheme of things no, but it’s much cheaper than those and being a dynamic headphone, not a planar.

I think is safe to say that it is the lowest distortion dynamic headphone measured to date.
 

KeithPhantom

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One note about tonality: if you are going to boost bass to comply with Harman curve, then you need to make sure the upper frequencies are there as well. Without that, the headphone will sound overwhelming bass heavy sounding. With Dan Clark, Audeze headphones, the bass is much lower by default so it doesn't come across the same way as the Airpods Max.
I just bought the LCD-X (2021) and also have the AirPods Max EQd with a Qudelix 5K and with the 'same' Harman EQ they sound different, completely different. Even with EQ curves from other places, they do not sound the same or even similar. The LCD-X seem to EQ pretty well, but the AirPods Max are always lacking upper midrange and lower treble even when boosted. I needed to further boost this region just to get them where I wanted them to be. The bass is great, but it is overwhelming as you said. There was a time that I could only use them as my only headphone and got used to them, but made other headphones sound bass-light.
 

KeithPhantom

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The answer is they're both bad.
Umm, I do not think so. The LCD-X at least are consistent in the way you can apply EQ to them and sound similar to the Harman Target, but the AirPods Max are a whole another story; they are the most inconsistent headphone to EQ I've found. Their main problem is the 1-3 kHz region, which at least to me, I needed to further boost this area compared to the EQ provided either autoEQ, Amir, or Oratory.
 

GaryH

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Umm, I do not think so. The LCD-X at least are consistent in the way you can apply EQ to them and sound similar to the Harman Target, but the AirPods Max are a whole another story; they are the most inconsistent headphone to EQ I've found. Their main problem is the 1-3 kHz region, which at least to me, I needed to further boost this area compared to the EQ provided either autoEQ, Amir, or Oratory.

They're both bad, just in different ways. The APM's crap unit/head/positional consistency? Bad. The LCD-X's crap stock response and probable non-minimum phase error in the bass (look at the huge group delay swing there, combined with the kink in frequency response), all for the exorbitant price of $1,200? Bad. How do you know when you've been fleeced? When the product you bought costs more than Apple's offering.
 
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@amrim

I'm curious if you've covered this topic.

If our ears naturally amplify those regions 1khz to 7khz, why do we extra amplification or response from headphones in that region?
 

JohnYang1997

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@amrim

I'm curious if you've covered this topic.

If our ears naturally amplify those regions 1khz to 7khz, why do we extra amplification or response from headphones in that region?
Because you bypasses of alters some of those amplifications process.
And because there's no way of measuring the amplification gain itself, the solution is to measure at eardrum reference point. So no matter what happened before as long the frequency response at eardrum is correct you will hear the music as it's supposed to be.
 

okok

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The APM has fantastically low distortion, but it's not the "lowest distortion hp ever".


I don't want to make you sad, but these LCD etc was beat by STAX 009, regarding distortion

world's quite big
 
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amirm

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@amrim

I'm curious if you've covered this topic.

If our ears naturally amplify those regions 1khz to 7khz, why do we extra amplification or response from headphones in that region?
The headphone is NOT producing extra magnification. It is producing flat response that then measures magnified with the microphone that is inside the artificial ear. To get it to do what apple headphone is doing, it requires filtering/reducing the output which is wrong. The Apple headphone is producing a negative curve that when combined with the positive gain of the artificial ear winds up being "flat."
 
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@amrim

Thank makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.

If you were to measure a set of flat loudspeakers in with your headphone rig, we should expect to see a similar bump?
 

KeithPhantom

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@amrim

Thank makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.

If you were to measure a set of flat loudspeakers in with your headphone rig, we should expect to see a similar bump?
Not @amirm but yes, the ear will make the measurement to have this 'bump' in that region. It is just ta natural amplification that is programmed in our physiology. It isn't the headphones who produce this effect, is the interaction of the sound waves with the artificial (and hence, our ears) ears.
 
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Not @amirm but yes, the ear will make the measurement to have this 'bump' in that region. It is just ta natural amplification that is programmed in our physiology. It isn't the headphones who produce this effect, is the interaction of the sound waves with the artificial (and hence, our ears) ears.

Understood. Thanks for helping.
 
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