[ianhowson]

I honestly think that audio quality is consistently poor on Apple stuff and they try to patch over it with EQ boosts and marketing.

AirPods are better than EarPods, but they're still in $25 earphone range.

AirPods Pro are nice, but you can get wired IEMs for <$100 that sound just as good. In that price range you can get Pinnacle P1 ($200) or ER4XR ($250) which dump all over them. I use AirPods Pro daily, not for quality, but for convenience.

HomePod is probably the biggest disappointment I've ever heard. $300 and it sounds like a plastic box, despite "computational audio".

At $550, you're solidly in headphone big leagues. Beyer DT770 or DT990 are close to perfect and they're <$200. Beyond that point you're hitting diminishing returns in audio quality; double price is going to get tiny marginal improvements in quality.

I'm eager to hear them but I can't imagine them outperforming DT990s, despite costing twice as much.

(Yes, none of these options have bluetooth or ANC. Get an ES100 for BT. If noise is a problem, get IEMs or AirPods Pro.)

[adamlett]

When it comes to audio quality and red wine I am completely unable to appreciate the quality differences over a certain minimum threshold, which is quite low (at least as measured by price). Maybe I would be able tell the medium level stuff from the very high end if I was allowed to compare them to each other in an undisturbed environment, but if I then had to guess which was the more expensive, I would likely get it wrong a good chunk of the times. I usually tell people that my senses are just not acute enough, but secretly I suspect that most people who claim to be able to appreciate the differences that I am unable to, really aren't either and are at best just experiencing the placebo effect. The fact that you report to be disappointed by the audio quality of the HomePod, a product that a lot of reviewers praised first and foremost for its audio quality, does nothing to relieve me of this suspicion.

Who knows whether or not I am right or not? What I am quite certain of, is that I'm not likely unique when it comes to not being able to appreciate the small differences in quality that cost the most. Which is to say that for me and a lot of other people, it seems pointless to get hung up on whether one pair of very good headphones sound marginally better than another pair of very good headphones. Unless you're working in a studio as a sound producer, at a certain point the audio quality simply ceases to be the most important attribute of a pair of headphones. I don't know if it's true that you can get a pair of wired IEMs that sound better than the AirPods Pro, but even if it is, it's irrelevant, because the AirPods Pro sound fine to most people who buy them.

Through the years I've owned several different brands of headphones in the price range $100–$150 that I bought because reviewers claimed they were extraordinarily good value for the money when it came to sound quality. And maybe they were, but I've hated most of them for getting mostly everything else wrong: Wrong length of wire, wrong placement of microphone and buttons, and just horrible build quality.

[ianhowson]

I think we're in vigorous agreement.

I use the AirPods Pro not because they sound the best, but because they sound good enough and the convenience factors make them worthwhile.

I dump on the HomePod because it lacks any convenience factors that are meaningful to me [1] and it doesn't even serve the "speaker that sounds good" purpose [2].

So I really want to know what the value prop for AirPods Max is. They're not convenient or useful for travel because they're too big. They're not "best audio quality", because that's been done at lower price points. Spatial audio and ANC? Already solved, better, by AirPods Pro, at half the price. They're not even usable for critical listening or gaming because of Bluetooth.

So what are they for? Fashion? (Nothing wrong with that, but I'm sure as hell not going to spend $550 for it.)

[1] Siri can't understand me and it false triggers constantly.

[2] It wasn't even like, "hey its good but there are better speakers". They sounded like a cheap plastic box. They were better than my $100 Google Home. They're worse than the $120 soundbar I put on a TV. It's a low bar.

[_ph_]

Have you tried the Homepod in a stereo pair? To me it makes a huge difference to the point that I assume that they have completely different profiles for them when running in stereo mode. Assuming a different audience than a single Homepod.

[hombre_fatal]

You're going to continually misunderstand the market if you think $200 wired headphones with a line running from your head into a $100 ES100 Bluetooth receiver clipped to your belt is an analogue for the wireless cans people want.

[ianhowson]

I do misunderstand. Please educate me! What makes these better than other headphones or the AirPods Pro, which are looking downright good value right now?