Apple AirPods Max
With stunning audio qualityqual and noise cancelling, thesethe stylish headphones more than justify their price
PRICE £458 (£549 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk
When it comes to making great headphones, you have two basic design routes: straightforward analogue engineering, where you build miracles of precision constructio construction with only the best materials, or y you take the digital route and rely on the h power of digital signal processing processin (DSP) to work miracles.
Apple does both, combining a precision analogue build with a computational DSP for each headphone. They also tap into an array of mics (both inside and outside the cups) that use adaptive frequency response shaping of the in-ear soundfield to best match the incoming signal. It’s a technological tour de force unlike any I’ve seen in my decades of testing headphones.
Each ear has ten cores of CPU power for all the processing work required, implemented on custom Apple H1 CPUs. But that’s not all – imagine watching a movie on an iPad or iPhone, and having a 5.1 or Atmos soundtrack. Then let the headphone “binauralise” this to surround sound in the headphones itself. Then add in accelerometers to work out how your head is moving relative to the iPhone/ iPad and then calculate the soundfield that tracks the screen as you move it around. The AirPods do all of that too.
Apple’s next trick is to make all this work with zero input and twiddling from the user. (Heck, if you own more than one Apple device, switching between sources is seamless and automatic.) A typical pair of Bluetooth headphones comes with an app that offers a wide range of adjustment tools: EQ labelled Jazz, Voice, Smooth, Classical, as if good sound was defined by the genre.
Apple is having none of that. There are no adjustments aside from control over noise cancellation. There isn’t even a power switch. Slide the headphones into the curiously shaped case that goes over the ear cups and magnets tell the headphones to switch down to an ultra-low consumption mode. Even this seems overkill when you consider that you will get around 20 hours of listening time. Plus, five minutes of charging delivers 1.5 hours of listening.
Such longevity is good news because all this quality means you’ll want to wear them the whole day, and they’re comfortable even over long periods; my ears didn’t get too hot despite the fully-encased design of the ear cup. The build quality is beautiful, although time will tell how the matte paint will survive daily wear and tear. The ear pads detach and are held on by magnets; I’m sure some users will mix and match.
“Put on the AirPods Max and, after a second or two of the computers listening to the mics, the outside world just disappears”
What of sound quality? It’s superb. Not t up there with the multi-thousand pound und Sennheiser HD800 or Stax electrostatics l ctrostatics I use as my reference headphones h adphones in the lab, but music is clear, ar, clean and full of detail. Balance is excellent, xcellent, without any of the headache-inducing h adache-inducing bass boost that some me vendors impose.
Then we come to active noise cancellation ncellation (ANC). Cheaper headphones adphones achieve effective results using ng basic techniques, but truly excellent ellent cancellation allows you to listen ten even at low volumes.
Few ew things wreck hearing faster than han hours of daily exposure to music played at 10/10 on a phone, trying ying to overcome the noise of the bus, b s, train or underground.
With the AirPods Max, noise cancellation ncellation is staggering – classleading l ding at over 50dB around 150Hz, extending ending usefully up to about 2kHz. Put them on and, after a second or two of the he computers listening to the internal ernal and external mics then doing their t eir sums, the outside world just disappears. As in a nothingness where you can only hear your heartbeat. You need to turn Ambient mode on if you want to listen to someone shouting at you from 3ft away.
You must spend another £35 for the Lightning-to-3.5mm cable if you want to plug the AirPods Max into legacy sources – all the functionality works just as if it was on Bluetooth. There’s a lot of technology in this cable, but when you’re spending £549 for a pair of headphones it really should be in the box. Android users? They can connect to the AirPods Max as a normal set of Bluetooth headphones and enjoy all the onboard noise-cancelling technology, but spatial audio tricks are reserved for Apple owners only.
The Apple AirPods Max is the absolute cutting edge of headphone design and implementation. The only downside is the £549 cost, and whilst that is an undeniably robust price they are worth every penny. Their sound quality, active noise cancelling and utter simplicity form an intoxicating combination that sets new standards.