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Airpods Max Sucked for Me

mattfarrugia.com

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Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me

#11

Post by bgentry »

Analemma_ wrote: post #4

Bluetooth on Macs is infuriatingly broken, even with Apple's own products. I have the AirPods Pro with a 2019 13" MBP and run into similar issues: if I'm just listening to music, everything is fine. As soon as the microphones come on to do a call, the audio quality goes down the tube and there is a loud crackling noise in the right AirPod that never goes away (and I know this isn't the crackling problem with AirPods…

Agreed. On my iMac Pro, both AirPods and AirPods Pro had serious reliability issues. Occasionally during calls I would end up having skipping audio issues, and my bluetooth magic trackpad would also stutter when these issues were ongoing. Sometimes the bluetooth driver would seemingly crash, everything would reconnect, and it would be fine.

The workaround I discovered was that if I plugged in my bluetooth trackpad via USB during a call, these issues would basically never happen.

Not to mention all the other general issues with them failing to stay connected to my Mac, or failing to connect initially. These issues also happened on multiple MacBook Pros, including new top-of-the-line 16" models. Whereas I have basically zero problems with AirPods on my iPhone or AppleTV.

In short: the macOS bluetooth stack has some serious shortcomings that aren't present in iOS.

Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me

#13

Post by AlexandrB »

Analemma_ wrote: post #4

Bluetooth on Macs is infuriatingly broken, even with Apple's own products. I have the AirPods Pro with a 2019 13" MBP and run into similar issues: if I'm just listening to music, everything is fine. As soon as the microphones come on to do a call, the audio quality goes down the tube and there is a loud crackling noise in the right AirPod that never goes away (and I know this isn't the crackling problem with AirPods…

Bluetooth is infuriatingly broken. Headphones work sometimes and not others. My car sometimes connects to my phone and other times not. Doing Bluetooth voice chat on discord with some games breaks game audio completely.

The most reliable Bluetooth I've found is a hardware device that pretends to be a USB sound card and connects to my headphones via Bluetooth. Anything with a full operating system seems like a disaster.

Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me

#14

Post by dpedu »

Audio / bluetooth on macs is currently a total disaster. My newer macs - mainly a 2019 15" - have some truly bizarre behaviors around these. One example is that if I switch 3.5mm audio cables too quickly it starts routing audio to my HDMI monitor instead. Macs still can't control the volume of HDMI audio out so that means I get hit with a max volume blast. I have to detach one cable, wait 60 seconds, and attach the other to avoid this.

Like the author describes, activating the mic on bluetooth headsets on my mac - airpods or 3rd party - brings the audio bitrate down to a quality comparable to AM radio. Strangely, I can use the airpods to make calls on my Android phone with little issue.

Audio aside, I routinely encounter bluetooth devices that just won't work with my mac. For example keyboards that send just a few keystrokes then bug out or mice that lag and teleport all over the screen.

The most infuriating part is that I can attach a USB bluetooth adapter and use it instead of the builtin mac one and all of these problems go away. But am I going to carry around a port adapter and a dongle so I can use a feature that I paid for in my laptop anyway? As if. Furthermore none of these accessories have trouble with other computers - even older macs!

/rant

Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me

#18

Post by diebeforei485 »

mfarrugia wrote: post #2

I admit that my requirements are not the standard ones, I just thought this might be useful info for other people who, like me, thought they'd be perfect for working from home

It is frustrating how opaque bluetooth is. A lot of regular folks would have no idea that getting a newer Mac would improve their airpods microphone quality.

For what it's worth I have found the NC 700's to have a much better microphone quality when in self voice mode. It's explained here: https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a594565/bose-noise-can...

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