The AirPods Pro 2 earbuds may be worth their asking price, as a series of tests performed by musician and software developer Stephen Coyle has indicated that the new H2 chip inside the units offers significant improvements in Bluetooth signal latency.
Latency has always been a downside of Bluetooth as well as other wireless technologies and stands as the time between when a sound occurs on your device and when that sound is then played through your AirPods. This isn’t a problem for things like video playback, where the video can be delayed slightly in order to ensure the audio is correctly lined up.
Unfortunately, latency can become an issue with what Coyle has previously referred to as “unpredictable” sounds, like notifications, sound effects, keyboard clicks, audio editing, and more. The original AirPods Pro offered a significant improvement in latency performance compared to the original AirPods, and the AirPods Pro 2 seem to have further improved upon this.
Coyle used the following methodology to test the feature:
“I’ve kept mostly the same testing methodology as before; I connect AirPods to an iPad Pro, and tap the screen with an Apple Pencil. I use an audio recorder to capture the sound of the physical taps, and the resulting audio, then measure the time between these sounds. One difference from previous tests is that I’ve decided to measure only keyboard click latency.”
Per Coyle’s findings, the AirPods Pro 2 “perform about 40ms better than their predecessors, with an average latency of 126ms vs the original’s 167ms.”
Coyle offered the following additional points:
“Perhaps a more interesting point to note is that the second-generation AirPods Pro perform only 43ms worse than the built-in speakers (at 83ms). That suggests that up to two-thirds of the time between touching the screen and hearing a noise occurs before Bluetooth data leaves the device.”
Coyle concluded that he still believes there’s “too much latency for audio feedback to feel snappy and responsive” with AirPods Pro 2. He stated that it’s possible for further improvements to be made on the device-side as opposed to the AirPods themselves.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via 9to5Mac and stephencoyle.net