The Audio Quality of Apple AirPods’ Microphone

I’ve engineered many podcast recording sessions where the guest used AirPods as their microphone and monitors. I’ve also done post-production on all that recorded AirPods audio. It’s my conclusion that AirPods are wonderfully handy for phone calls and listening to music, etc., but they are not that great for recording podcast audio. Their microphone just doesn’t sound that good (in terms of professional audio quality).

I’ve had lots of trouble finding the technical specifications of the frequency response of the microphone used in various lines of AirPods. If you can find these data please share them in the comments below 😉

As I mention in my 2019 post titled AirPods and Zencastr, like Oil and Water, I believe the sample rate of some/most/all AirPods is 16kHz which is not great, not terrible. But I’d bet that it’s the Bluetooth connectivity that severely diminishes the audio quality of AirPods.

Have you had to produce AirPods audio? What was your experience?

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