I'm shocked by how many people claim to be able to state absolutes about a product that they've never tried. How do you know your headphones offer better sound isolation and better sound quality?
Ya that's a fair point, but the flip side is that there are people in the comments ready to preorder, also without having tried the product. There's something cringy to me about that level of blind brand loyalty.
What? There’s a difference between buying a product before trying it and making specific claims about how its sound quality compared to other products before trying it or even seeing any reviews. I buy tons of products before trying them...that’s how you try them.
I suspect return policies are often used to justify unnecessary purchases. How many times have you bought something online you didn't actually want, but then didn't return it because it was too much of a hassle?
It's perhaps more fair to say that generous return policies reduce the risk of choosing a premium product in a category because they let the buyer verify the (subjective) value of it.
Who says that loyalty is blind? Typically the preorder purchasers have a bunch of other Apple products and are happy with them and trust that the headphones will live up to that. It might be optimistic (it definitely is sometimes), but it's based on an expectation built on history.
Active noise cancellation necessarily loses fidelity because it's imperfect technology. Passive 30db of noise reduction is a lot better. Likewise, cramming your entire DAC into one little chip is also a recipe for decreasing output quality.
As to quality, Shure IEMs are very close to as good as it gets, so even in the best case, apples cans wouldn't be better (though the speaker in their teardown doesn't look too good).
From a speaker stand point that may be the case, but I'm sure Apple threw a lot more money for the electronic hardware and software integration. I'm not sure why 10 audio chips are needed from a technical standpoint but it is probably different than what Shure does. Probably some innovations in digital to analog conversion and processing bluetooth data.
There's three reasons Shure IEMs don't need any processing to sound as good or better than the AirPods Max, and it boils down to physics too.
Firstly, the Shure IEMs are IEMs, not on-ear headphones.
Secondly, since they use physical isolation, there is no need for ANC, which means much less calculation power needed.
Thirdly, they bypass the outer ear. This means that the outer ear won't color the sound, which means that you don't need to correct for that (which is what modern autoequalizers do). Of course this is a bit less natural, but carefully tuned drivers work around that excellently.
Fourth, they are wired, which removes the need for processing the audio signal. Modern DACs are practically indistinguishable from perfection, so that's not an issue.
Fifth, they use balanced armature drivers instead of dynamic drivers. This means that they are not affected at all by resonance and other effects.
This is why Shure IEMs can do both better isolation and better audio quality than even experimental smart headphones. They simply eliminate all the issues by physical means.
The one issue that can't be quite fixed is that Soundstage won't sound as wide as would be possible with open back headphones, but these are closed headphones with ANC so it probably won't be any worse.
Basically, the point is to remove the physical issues so that you don't have to fix them in software. This is a lot more cost efficient and, for things like ANC that can't be done perfectly, gives a better result.
thanks for the informative post, the only qualm I have is that "wired" is an objective improvement. Obviously it is easier to get better quality with wired, but for many people,the benefits of wireless are a huge win over wired.
If that requires a lot of processing, so be it, but that is value added to many people.
