As we’ve talked about recently, the AirPods Pro 3 is a pain in the butt to measure, but difficulty doesn’t mean people should feel okay providing subpar measurements.
That’s why we went through the effort to make sure all of our measurements for the AirPods Pro 3 were as well done as they reasonably could be (and equally importantly, labeled correctly), so people can see what is going on under the hood here.
Note that Andrew (our resident squigpiggy) is currently in the middle of a move, so there were certain conditions that couldn’t be idealized and certain time constraints that we had to work within to get this data out there. But we wanted to make sure you all had something reasonable to chew on for when we published our full review, which can be seen here:
Without further ado, here are our measurements, with their specification outlined:
Compensated, typical visualization from The Headphone Show
Thanks for this. Did you check out Soundguys and their Youtube review? They seem to have gotten different frequency response measurements depending on the security of the fit.
I think that this is an erroneous assessment on their part. If the wear sensor is off, while the earbud can still play sounds, numerous functions are deactivated, like ANC, so it should be very, very easy for anyone to quickly notice something is wrong.
What’s likely happening is that their 5128 pinna might be less reliable to trigger it than human skin, but it’s their job to do it properly anyway like HP.com did.
A quick note in regards to the above measurements, in particular the ANC off ones, I think that the differences below 1kHz and especially the notches can be explained by the 5128’s tendency to show “rocking” modes that may not occur in real human ear canals, combined with the ANC off Adaptive EQ function working in a different way from when the feedback loop is activated (all other modes), and not having the capacity to apply very fine grained filters to counteract these notches.
This measurement was done in a clone 711 coupler with putty to stabilise the Airpods to avoid any rocking mode and the difference is lesser.
