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Isolation |
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• High Maximum Usable Volume.
• Good isolation levels.
• Virtually no leakage. |
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Sound Quality |
Page 4 of 12 |
Comfort |
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Maximum Usable Volume (9.84)
What we found:
The Apple In-ear Headphones with Remote and Mic were capable of a decent maximum usable volume: 119.34 decibels. We stop awarding points at the 120dB mark, because anything louder than that is doing you more harm than good. Anything withing 10dB of 120 is excellent, making the Apple In-ears excellent. You shouldn't have any volume concerns with these headphones.
What is maximum usable volume?
When you boost your playback volume, your headphones' distortion increases. There is a point on all headphones where boosting the volume another notch will result is annoyingly distorted playback. We refer to this point as the maximum usable volume. It isn't literally the max volume the headphones can output, just the most they can output without it sounding like garbage. If you'd like to know more, you should click on this link.
How the test works:
As described above, max usable volume is the point at which distortion is degrading your sound quality by a noticeable amount. The test is an intuitive one: perform a series of distortion tests, looking for the point at which the scales tip at 3% total harmonic distortion. If you passed up the opportunity to click on the previous link and absolutely refuse to backtrack while reading, we have thoughfully put the link here as well.
Isolation (8.20)
What we found:
The Apple In-ear Headphones with Remote and Mic had good isolation for in-ears. Good isolation for in-ears is excellent isolation for any other headphone type. Like most in-ear headphones, the majority of the sound blocked out is towards the high-end, with less blocked out from 100-1000Hz. This isn't the best isolation score we've seen for a set of in-ears, but the Apple In-ears do block out more sound on average than high-end active noise cancellers.
How the Apple In-ear Headphones with Remote and Mic compares:
What is isolation?
Isolation refers to your headphones' ability to block out external sounds. Until science invents an exception to the rule, there are two ways a set of headphones can isolate its user: active noise cancellation and passive attenuation. Passive attenuation refers to an object physically blocking sound from entering your ears. You use passive attenuation when you cover your head with a pillow or stick your fingers in your ears. Active noise cancellation isolates its user by actually negating incoming sounds. Active noise cancelling headphones have a microphone that they use to listen to the surrouning noise. Once the headphones get a general sense of your ambient surroundings, it plays back a sound of inverse amplitude. If you'll recall from your 6th grade science class, when a wave meets a wave of opposite amplitude, they cancel each other out. As a general rule, active noise cancellation technology isn't quite as good as the best set of in-ear headphones, but this is quickly changing. In-ears are typically better for blocking out more noise overall, while active-cancellers do a better job negating bass but all short on middle and high frequencies. To find out more on this fascinating subject, click here.
How the test works:
To test isolation, we put the headphones on HATS, then blast HATS with a known amount of noise. Since we know exactly what we're outputting, we can check how the headphones isolate users from any given frequency. For a few more details, read this article.
Leakage (10.00)
What we found:
The Apple In-ears really don't have a problem with leakage. We rarely see leakage issues on in-ears that fit into the ear canal and the Apple In-ears stick with this trend. When playing back music at normal or even louder-than-normal decibel levels, someone sitting right next to you won't be able to hear anything. Of course, if you're playing music at max volume in a quiet place, nearby people will hear a bit of a whisper, so maintain reasonable volume levels in such scenarios.
What is leakage?
Leakage refers to any sound that's escaping the circuit of you and your headphones. When a headphone has a lot of leakage, someone sitting next to you will be able to hear your music. For a pair of portable headphones, leakage is a bad thing. No one really wants to broadcast their playback to everyone in the vicinity (if someone did, there are really more efficient ways of doing so). You probably won't want to take leaky headphones to a museum or your local public library. For at-home headphones, leakage is a more ambiguous property of the headphones. In a private listening environment leakage isn't much of an issue since there's no one to annoy. Chances are you'll actually prefer a certain degree of leakage, since that partially indicates a more open sound stage (as opposed to what you get from headphones with closed backs, where your music sound like it's housed in a tiny room).
How the test works:
Once again the headphones go in HATS. This time, however, instead of assaulting the headphones with external sound, we play a set amount of noise through the headphones while a microphone nearby listens for leakage.
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