![]() It is my job to keep up to date with the audio scene, provide my thoughts and opinions on various products and topics, and of course making sure that my measurements database don’t go obsolete by keeping it updated with new releases.Īs for why you should listen to me… that’s really your call to make. This is my full-time job so one could call me a “professional” considering that, well, this is my profession. (Do note that the portable audio hobby is relatively young, so don’t expect your average “veteran of the hobby” to have “decades of experience” like with the 2-channel speaker world.)Ĭurrently I maintain the world’s largest public database of frequency response measurements for headphones and earphones, and I also maintain highly popular ranking lists of (most of) said headphones and earphones. In short, I’ve been in the hobby for a little over a decade, and been involved in the audiophile community for a little under that. I first started in the hobby in the late 2000s (the earliest official record being my Head-Fi registration in 2011) and started getting a reputation for myself only around 2016, with the IEF website being created in early 2019. Hello, I am known as “crinacle” and I run In-Ear Fidelity (IEF), a fully independent website dedicated to the “portable audio” scene of the audiophile hobby, mainly focused on headphones and earphones. So first and foremost, I’m sure there’ll be many reading this review who aren’t familiar with me or my work who would (understandably) be asking: who is this guy? Why is he calling himself an audiophile? Why should I listen to him? If you’re not interested in the following, you can skip right to the next section using the Table of Contents above. In-Ear Fidelity is here to answer the question they skim over: how good does the AirPods Max sound? As per usual, let them handle the other stuff: the build, the looks, the software, the convenience, whatever. Apple has entered the headphone game, and so now it’s time for the tech YouTubers to make way. And if anything else, I’m just happy that Apple would be normalising the concept of spending $500 a headphone, just like it normalised spending $250 on a true wireless earbud. ![]() But to everyone else, it’s a new frontier, a whole new world that the gods at Apple have opened their eyes to. For some, $500 is only enough to pay for the amplifier that powers their $1,500 headphone. $500 is pretty much chump change to the ballers of the headphone hobby. ![]() But now Apple wants to play a different game, from entertaining the masses and the prosumers to having their feet firmly planted into the hifi scene: a headphone that costs more than $500. And it really wasn’t until the AirPods Pro that people realised that they could make a decent earphone (after removing the headphone jack, of course). Sure, the EarPods (and the sonically identical AirPods) weren’t exactly good sounding transducers. The original Apple earbuds was built with drivers sourced from Fostex, their devices once sported DACs from Wolfson and Cirrus Logic, and let’s not forget that they’ve literally pioneered (or at the very least, highly popularised) revolutionised the concept of “portable audio” with the iPod and its variants. Regardless of existing reputation.ĭespite what we audiophile snobs would like to believe, Apple is no amateur in the audio world. If a brand makes something good (or bad), I’ll give credit where credit is due. I hate macOS, love iOS, hate the AirPods, and am lukewarm towards the AirPods Pro. Let’s get it straight first, I’m neither an Apple fanboy nor a hater. For a brief overview and non-audio opinions, refer to my first impressions on the AirPods Max.
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