Apple goodies are in Prime Day sales today and tomorrow

[OtinG]

The Apple AirPods Pro are marked down to $189.99 on Amazon for their Prime Day sale. (They are normally $249 at the Apple Store on Apple's website, but Amazon often has them for less than that.) I didn't see any Prime membership requirement for getting the discount, but look carefully just to make sure.

There is a lot of other Apple goodies in Prime Day sales today and tomorrow too, including iPads and Macs.

I decided to get the Amazon Echo Buds 2nd gen as they are on sale for Prime Day at $80, marked down from the usual $120. They are not nearly as good as the AirPods Pro, but they are more in my price range. Unfortunately they don't have Spatial Audio, but I doubt I would be able to hear that well enough to take advantage of it anyway. I also think they don’t support Dolby Atmos as I can’t find any reference to Dolby in the specs. (At least I think that is what I read.) I'll give them a try and if they don’t work well enough for my hearing issues I'll return them and try something else later.

ETA: I corrected and clarified a bit of information on the Echo Buds 2nd gen.

[John F]

Originally Posted by OtinG

The Apple AirPods Pro are marked down to $189.99 on Amazon for their Prime Day sale. (They are normally $249 at the Apple Store on Apple's website, but Amazon often has them for less than that.) I didn't see any Prime membership requirement for getting the discount, but look carefully just to make sure.

There is a lot of other Apple goodies in Prime Day sales today and tomorrow too, including iPads and Macs.

I decided to get the Amazon Echo Buds 2nd gen as they are on sale for Prime Day at $80, marked down from the usual $120. They are not nearly as good as the AirPods Pro, but they are more in my price range. Unfortunately they don't have Spatial Audio, but I doubt I would be able to hear that well enough to take advantage of it anyway. I also think they may not have Dolby Atmos, although they do have Dolby DTS which is what Atmos piggy-backs onto. (At least I think that is what I read.) I'll give them a try and if they don’t work well enough for my hearing issues I'll return them and try something else later.

I haven't heard of Dolby DTS? DTS used to be a seperate system/company from Dolby, have they merged or something?

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by John F

I haven't heard of Dolby DTS? DTS used to be a seperate system/company from Dolby, have they merged or something?

Actually, after carefully checking the specs again on various sites, I was unable to find any reference to Dolby or DTS, so apparently they don’t support either. I had read that for a different item and confused which item had what. Pitfall of growing old!

I think you are correct on DTS being a separate company that licenses Digital Surround System to companies. I read the following sentence on my TV soundbase specs page and misread the wording to mean Dolby Digital and DTS were both Dolby. Here is the sentence, “This system incorporates Dolby* Digital and the DTS** Digital Surround System.” When I looked up the single and double asterisk footnotes it states they are separate companies. My soundbase is several years old, so no telling whether they are still separate companies.

At any rate, I not going to worry too much about Dolby support on the Echo Buds as far as TV programming goes since very little content even uses Dolby Atmos yet. A few years from now that might be a different story though. Music is a different story. But I’m going to be using my Echo Buds mostly for TV and video content.

[John F]

Originally Posted by OtinG

Actually, after carefully checking the specs again on various sites, I was unable to find any reference to Dolby or DTS, so apparently they don’t support either. I had read that for a different item and confused which item had what. Pitfall of growing old!

I think you are correct on DTS being a separate company that licenses Digital Surround System to companies. I read the following sentence on my TV soundbase specs page and misread the wording to mean Dolby Digital and DTS were both Dolby. Here is the sentence, “This system incorporates Dolby* Digital and the DTS** Digital Surround System.” When I looked up the single and double asterisk footnotes it states they are separate companies. My soundbase is several years old, so no telling whether they are still separate companies.

At any rate, I not going to worry too much about Dolby support on the Echo Buds as far as TV programming goes since very little content even uses Dolby Atmos yet. A few years from now that might be a different story though. Music is a different story. But I’m going to be using my Echo Buds mostly for TV and video content.

It looks like they are still seperate companies. Dolby Labratories (NYSE : DLB) is a pulic traded company, and Digital Theater Systems is owned by a holding company?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by OtinG

I decided to get the Amazon Echo Buds 2nd gen as they are on sale for Prime Day at $80, marked down from the usual $120. They are not nearly as good as the AirPods Pro, but they are more in my price range. Unfortunately they don't have Spatial Audio, but I doubt I would be able to hear that well enough to take advantage of it anyway. I also think they don’t support Dolby Atmos as I can’t find any reference to Dolby in the specs. (At least I think that is what I read.) I'll give them a try and if they don’t work well enough for my hearing issues I'll return them and try something else later.

ETA: I corrected and clarified a bit of information on the Echo Buds 2nd gen.

Spatial Audio should work with any wireless or wired headphones, as long as the Apple device supports Dolby Atmos (it turns out my iPhone XS and iPad Pro 2nd gen do not, so only newer Apple or Beats headsets or Dolby Atmos capable headsets/speakers) can consume SA when connected to them.

But I with my iPad mini 5 my cheap BT 6 year old headphones do get SA. And wired headsets of any sort also do (though the Music app crashes on iPhone 11 with my Rayz headset plugged in when it hits Lossless/SA track !?).

I’m still somewhat at a loss about Lossless. This is a good reference:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183

In particular, analog headsets can get 24-bit/48 kHz lossless audio. Hi-dev Lossless is supported only with external DAC for the 0.001% of the population who claim they can hear the difference.

The murky part for me is this:

Can I listen to lossless audio using the AirPods Max Lightning to 3.5mm Audio Cable?
The Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.

It does not say what it means by ‘devices’. It cannot be a direct connection to iPhone which doesn’t have 3.5mm output (except via a Lightning to 3.5mm female adapter, which provides only 24-bit/48kHz). IPad 3.5mm out only supports Lossless (roughly CD quality), not hi-res lossless. I have that audio cable, and there’s no way it does analog-to-digital conversion (surely it just maps to the headset Lightning charging port analog pins — I would need super tiny leads for my meter to test this). And if the cable did convert to digital, then AirPods Pro can accept digital, in which case, you could presumably transmit digital directly and AirPod Pro would do the only DA conversion in the pipeline. Something doesn’t add up.

To my ears, even with Bluetooth compression, Lossless sounds better than the ‘High Quality’ 256kbps AAC (other services offer 320kpbs AAC). Lossless is just a better starting point prior to BT compression.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Spatial Audio should work with any headset.

So the only device that needs to have Smart Audio decoding capability is the ATV 4K, iPad, etc.? The speakers, headsets, soundbar, etc. can play SA if hooked up to a device that can decode SA? They don’t need to be able to decode SA. What about Dolby Atmos, the same thing?

When listening directly to TV programming, primarily I will have my Echo Buds connected via BT to my Sony Bravia TV or ATV 4K. Occasionally I will connect them to an iPad, but probably not very often.

However, I want to test out the idea of wearing just one in my ear with bad hearing and turn on the passthrough mode to see if I can amplify what my soundbase is producing. I’m hoping that will help my right ear to hear the sounds closer to the volume I can hear it in my left ear in order to get a stereo effect. I really don’t hear stereo effect that well at present. It probably won’t work, but it is worth a try. I guess we can call this an indirect use of them to better hear the audio produced by my sound system which is hooked up to my TV. I’ve already looked at the manual and the Alexa app does not seem to have a balance feature to turn up the volume on one side more than the other. Hence why I want to try what I described in this paragraph. Basically I’m going to try to use one Bud as a hearing aid by taking advantage of the passthrough feature, which is basically what a hearing aid does. I know hearing aids are much better, but they also cost many times more than even the Apple AirPods Pro.

I’m really skeptical that the hearing aid test will actually work, but you never know. If not, then I’ll mostly use them with my iPhone XR for phone conversations. My current BT device I use for that is getting very wonky.

[OtinG]

ETA: Deleted since this thread got moved and what I wrote doesn't seem to be a good fit for Deals forum.