I'm a slight audiophile, enough to own a Schitt stack and lower-end planar magnetics, overall cost would be slightly more than the AirPods Max 2. I did try the previous generation and walked away with no emotional response either way to the quality of the sound.
The Apple tax makes me extremely skeptical that I would get $500+ worth of sound quality, however ANC upsets that equation quite a bit. For around the same cost I could get a much better set of DAC+Amp+Headphones but it would sound objectively worse in a noisy environment.
You also can't experience true lossless on any bluetooth audio output device, for what that's worth (many "true" audiophiles would fail an A/B test for AAC).
The previous generation were also REALLY bassy, and there's nothing wrong with that, bassy headphones are how to make things sound "fun" and that's why the likes of Beats make so much money. That categorically makes it not audiophile, though, because it just takes an EQ/pre-amp to achieve the same effect (which can be toggled on and off).
Ultimately, my most basic issue with these is that if you're willing to blow 500 bucks on headphones, then going modular (DAC+Amp+Headphones) will give you more room to explore something that you apparently really enjoy.
> You also can't experience true lossless on any bluetooth audio output device
Pretty sure you can... there's no technical reason you cannot use BT purely as a digital-only lossless data carrier. Whether or not current devices exist that work this way may be another story though.
That is through a ADC then DAC, at least for the previous iteration, analog direct to the drivers was not supported. You would be compounding distortion, and largely throwing away what the external DAC+Amp had on offer.
As a (sane) audiophile, I happily use Apple devices for enjoyable listening. Their headphones have amazing clarity and soundstage for their size. If you keep in mind that AirPods are calibrated to your ears with your iPhone's FaceID camera, they provide nice, tailored sound.
I also have nice, but not over the top equipment. Yes, some of them sound nicer and more detailed (you can't compare large, 100W/channel bookshelf speakers with headphones, can you?), but for getting 95% of what they provide without any effort is pretty worth it.
Last, but not the least, Apple used Wolfson DACs in their iPods for most of their lifetime. Their replacement DACs are not worse than the Wolfsons, but probably even better.
That’s what Apple states, yes, but I suspect that it’s also used for calibrating the inner microphones of newer AirPods which is used for the “live eq” which works by listening the feedback inside the ear.
From my experience, Apple can sometimes “forget” to tell things.
Modern Apple gives you control over everything by hiding it in Accessibility settings. You can control almost everything about AirPods and give them custom EQ there. But it doesn't have that.
I love this “oxymoron” label slapped on me, without knowing what audiophile actually means.
Its meaning has distorted as much as how the word hacker is distorted.
Yes, I love listening to music and quality audio, but don’t have a soundtrack to benchmark systems. My bar is simple: Do I enjoy what I hear? It doesn’t have to fit into a recipe. It should be enjoyable, period.
A pair of Apple AirPods can be as enjoyable as two $10K speakers powered by a separate stack costing $20K. It’s akin to loving that hole in the wall restaurant as well as that Michelin rated one. Both are enjoyable in its own sense.
Well, I use the same amp, turntable and tuner for the last 30 years, and the same CD player and speakers for the last 10 years.
Changed the speakers since I had no space for the older Akai set, and replaced the CD player since the older one was acting up.
Replaced the Logitech Bluetooth receiver for a Fiio DAC last week since I found one for a bargain.
Everything is connected with high quality yet 30 year old cables.
I believe that’s a pretty sane evolution for someone who grown up with music, and performed some.
Oh there is a difference. but I strongly suspect its not as pronounced as you think it is.
THe biggest difference that most people hear is EQ. (oh these are very bassy, or too clean, etc, etc)
The people that have external DACs are almost certainly hearing a difference in EQ rather than _quality_. Is that a problem? for me I couldn't care less. However when that starts bleeding into advice or gatekeeping, then it becomes an issue.
(I am a former sound technician for both recording studio (analogue and digital) theatre and TV)
Personally, I run all my signal chain flat (incl. speaker crossovers). No equalizer, tone & loudness is off in every step of the chain.
Given the same set of speakers, I'm pretty sure that almost anything I throw in to the chain will sound pretty similar (unless it's designed to color the sound some way). This is one of the reasons why I don't plan to change any parts of it .
For me the DAC has some serious benefits in the sound quality department, though. First, it doesn't have the 3dB loss like the Logitech, second I can stream AAC or aptX to it, which really sounds better than SBC, given the song is mastered correctly and has the detail which can be carried by the codec itself.
I listen to some of the albums I have as CDs in streaming services and even though it's labeled as "lossless" I can hear that the files are butchered pretty badly.
I have a nontrivial listening rig in my house. I've spent thousands in headphones over the years (which happens quickly at $300-500 a pop). The finest ones I've owned MIGHT edge the Max out in certain conditions, but
- The Max add ANC
- The Max are wireless
- The Max are seamlessly integrated with the rest of my Apple gear
so to me that makes them the go-to -- so much so that I actually sold off the other headphones when we moved last year. I just wasn't using them.
The tl;dr is that the Max -- even the first gen -- do indeed perform very, very well.
It's always crazy to me to see this kind of smug takes defending huge corporations as if they're your friends.
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
It's less about defending and more about being annoyed with all the over-confident, uninformed opinions people frequently post in reaction to any news article on the subject.
Some people are going to spend 10 minutes refining a prompt to get a human looking 2 paragraphs message after rewriting half of it. Then they're going to be like GOTCHA I USED A LLM.
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/
MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404.
The issue has more to do with Nix poor onboarding, dreadful documentation and difficulty articulating its value proposition.
I personally think that the idea of Nix is fine but the execution is not there.
Look even Bazel which is built on fairly similar concepts but only targets built where it makes more sense and has a far better configuration language still struggle with adoption. It’s clear that Nix which wants to make immutable something people actually mostly never tinker will have to fight an uphill battle.
This is one of my main gripes with Nix. When something it's hard or unintuitive it's not Nix's fault, it's a skill issue on your part because you just "don't get it". It gets tiring quick.
