Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) Wireless Earbuds, Up to 2X More Active Noise Cancelling, Adaptive Transparency, Personalized Spatial Audio, MagSafe Charging Case, Blue

My use case for these is as daily wear headphones, particularly while working in an office. I have AirPods Gen 1 and I’m quite fond of them, but I’m also a fan of active noise cancelation. I am a pilot and I’ve used headsets with active noise cancelation (mostly Lightspeeds) for about 15 years now (I was an early adopter) and I also use electronic hearing protection while shooting. The AirPods Pro 2 are significantly cheaper than aviation headsets but roughly in the price range of shooting headsets so I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into with these – i.e. ear buds that offered an active noise cancelation that was not necessarily useful for hearing protection (they have no rating) but offered something like the active noise cancelation I’m used to from my Lightspeed aviation headset (in noise canceling mode) and something like the noise reduction with voice passthrough that I’m used to from my Sordin shooting headset when in transparent mode.

Noise reduction mode delivers shockingly well. It does a very good job of shutting out ambient noise. Someone watching TV in the background? Significantly muted. HVAC/fan/PC noise? Gone. They’re good enough that I’m probably going to wear them in my car since my Apple Watch informs me that my car is a loud enough environment that I’m vulnerable to long term hearing damage (it’s a convertible, the exhaust is quiet but there’s a lot of wind noise and the top doesn’t do much to quiet other people’s exhausts) and despite lacking a rating the rubber earpieces offer some passive noise reduction and the active may well be enough to take the edge off the poorly muffled motorcycles that seem to love to pace me right next to my left ear for miles on end.

Update: Not sure whether they’ve quietly updated their algorithms or just adjusted the default tuning in the background, but transparency mode is now usable. It still ought to support volume control, like active electronic hearing protection does. /Update

Transparency mode, on the other hand, is a massive disappointment. The idea behind transparency mode is, essentially, a not-rated-for-hearing-protection version of what you get with a pair of Sordins except instead of passive noise reduction with ambient noise passthrough (with processing to filter out sharp sounds, normalization, and clipping and filtering of loud sounds) and a volume control, so that ambient non-noise sound can be anywhere from significantly muted to amplified enough to cut through a pair of passive ear plugs worn under the electronic muffs. You sort of get a version of that. The AirPods Pro 2 add active noise reduction on top of it. Unfortunately, it’s tuned very poorly. The default transparency mode plus “active transparency” perform something like what a pair of Sordins does in terms of clipping maximum volume but there’s no volume control. You get a volume level that is basically slightly louder than ambient but with maybe some reduction of low range sounds and, crucially, a significant boost to mid and particularly high range sounds. HVAC noise is actually worse in transparency than it is when you’re not wearing the AirPods at all. It also has an extremely unfortunate effect on keyboard sounds. A typical keypress is sort of a dull, low, clack. The default transparency settings turn it into a louder, shriller, sharper click. My keyboard, which I never really thought about before, is actually quite unpleasant in transparency mode. In general, the default transparency mode is probably something one would only use for very short periods such as a temporary interaction with someone (e.g. long enough to order coffee). For longer term use it’s unpleasant enough that you would simply pull the AirPod out rather than switch modes. This is unfortunate as it largely undermines the entire sales pitch for the AirPods Pro. They aren’t something you could put in and leave in with transparency enabled while on a walk with a friend and carry on a conversation with someone while preventing your ears from being hurt by a passing vehicle that’s had its exhaust system compromised or wear in the office listening to music and switch to transparency mode to have a conversation with some coworkers. It amplifies background noise (again, keyboards become particularly unpleasant) enough that you’re much better off simply taking them out, exactly as you would have with the old first gen airpods.

There are custom adjustments for transparency (inexplicably buried a couple layers deep in accessibility settings rather than in the AirPod configuration menus) and they… help. Sort of. It’s possible, with some fiddling (the best settings I found were maximum ambient noise reduction, zero amplification, and darkest sound settings, conversation boost disabled) to configure transparency such that it actually does a much better job of muting unwanted ambient sounds (you can get rid of the HVAC again) and retaining clear voice passthrough and even acceptable music passthrough, but even after spending an hour or so playing with all of the available configuration options I cannot find one that allows me to leave transparency enabled while typing. It just makes keypresses to shrill, sharp, and loud. There’s a pretty significant amount of processing power built into these for their tiny size, though, so hopefully Apple will be able to update their algorithm such that you can wear them while using a computer. Honestly, given that Apple sells computers, it’s kind of shocking that they were released in this state, but here we are. (It’s worth noting that part of my disappointment comes from the Sordins I have being totally usable in similar situations (but lacking bluetooth and also obviously being industrial hearing protection) and I also have a set of Walker’s digital hearing protection that does have Bluetooth and is much better at ambient sound passthrough (at half the price) but having disappointing sound if you want to listen to music on them.

tl;dr Buy them if you have an iPhone and want good active noise cancelation in a very compact package with good battery life, and decent sound for music. If you’re buying them as something you could wear to get, essentially, some background noise reduction and loud noise reduction in an office setting while still being able to talk to coworkers with them in – their weird tendency to actually amplify certain unpleasant frequency ranges in transparency mode makes them poorly suited for this application.

Update: See Above