Airpods Pro 2 noise cancellation worse after firmware update 7A294

Same here. I used to use the ANC when sanding and using a drill and it provided enough noise cancelling, on par with other certified ear protection plugs.

Now after the firmware upgrade the ANC is not strong enough to use them safely on those activities.

Extremely frustrating.

no press release on this issue, no apologies, no fix for a long time. bravo, apple!

i will sell my airpods pro and never buy another pair, just because there’s a risk of the same situation happening again with airpods 3 etc.

Now, with airpods noise cancellation ON, I can clearly hear people talking, coughing, turning newspaper pages. So useless now!

Besides, I just liked reading in public transport with noise cancelling on and without listening to music. Now this option is gone too.

Keep up a terrible job, apple!

you were mistaken. adaptive cancels out less noise than anc, even when set to “less noise”

what makes me angry is that when anc is on, it doesn’t fully cancel out the noise in that way, that it cancels out 70% of the noise and the most distracting 30% remains. And that remaining 30% uncanceled noise is more distracting than if the noise was 70% uncanceled.

so anc is kinda useless now, in most cases. the remaining uncanceled sounds are more distracting than if they weren’t canceled out.

[Edited by Moderator]

Everything was simple and clear before the recent airpods pro 2 firmware updates: 

If you want to hear all of the outside sounds — use transparency mode.

If you want balance between ANC and transparency — use adaptive mode.

If you need to completely block the outside environment — use ANC mode.

So what do we have after the update:

Transparency mode amplifies the external sounds by 200-300%. What for? We paid for headphones with good ANC, not for medical hearing aid device! 

Adaptive mode - what is it now for? I don’t understand.

ANC mode - is completely funked up. It leaks so many high pitched sounds, which are quite distracting. In fact, in many cases it’s more annoying with ANC than without. You can clearly hear speech, transport noises, etc, while ANC is on. Which is disgusting and not how it used to be and not how it’s supposed to be and not what I paid for, in my humble opinion.

Apple, why not keep it working like this:

Transparent is transparent, ok.

Adaptive - keep it adaptive, balanced.

ANC - noise cancellation! Cancel out 97% of external noise, which is technically possible, as we remember from life before the  dreadful update

Rhetorical question. Of course they follow this topic, but will never react 🧐🤣

I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and had AirPods Pro until losing them near start of the year. After ages and much deliberation and research of other models against the newly released AirPods Pro 2nd gen I finally decided to bite the bullet and budgeted to afford to replace my old ones, confident that they were going to be as good as my first AirPods Pro, and hopefully better form what reviews had been saying. Well. It’s Christmas. I opened and received my brand spanking new AirPods Pro directly delivered from Apple. It’s been a while since I’ve had the pleasure so at first the noise cancelling (muffling) seemed to work and I was impressed with the new modes. It’s now been a day - a bustling, busy British Christmas Day - and I am very confident that these AirPods are just downright worse at CANCELLING noise. I could hear talking, music, barking, pretty much every sound outside of background noise, just muffled to be less loud. That’s not what I want, and that’s not why these USED to be praised as the one of the top contenders for sleek and efficient ANC headphones. I use my headphones for chill quiet me-time and to block out convos so I can focus at work. I’m so sad to say after looking forward to them for so long (they were my main present to myself), that I’ll most likely be going back to Apple and returning them unless they sort this out.

As literally hundreds and countless people have pointed out (bear in mind there are thousands others who probs just haven’t bothered), the problem clearly wasn’t present before a specific firmware update. Is this a silly safety thing beoimg

forced? Evil marketing so it looks like the next AirPods have improved cancellation?? Idk. But please fix it. I’ll be looking elsewhere for now, probs Sony or Beats, and will be a lot more cautious trusting Apple in the future. My mother caught an awful cough over Christmas and is on the other side of the room fully audible spluttering away as I’m typing this.

Suffice to say I’m left feeling extremely bitter and frustrated. Merry Christmas 👍

Hello, I have the same issue with my airpods pro 2.

I thought it was a problem

with the tips, so I bought brand new ones with a cleaning tool kit but the problem was still there after replacing them.

After some research I found your post on reddit and what I feared came true. Apple literally deleted the most important feature of this product.

I'm done with them. I'm out of the ecosystem.

I'm selling my Iphone 13 mini, my airpods pro and my watch series 6. I'm going OnePlus with the phone and Sony for the earphones.

And I went back to Qobuz.

Enough is enough.

I've just searched to see if there was anything outside this thread that could be useful, and I found several threads from a year ago of people complaining about the exact same thing after the IOS17 upgrade!!! replies stop around January but nobody goes back to those threads to say if it was finally fixed or not.

In one of the threads someone pointed to this feedback form to direct our complaints:

Feedback - AirPods - Apple

exactly the same for me. 3 months old AirPods Pro 2 cleaned regularly suddenly went from good ANC to not enough.

Same for me. I repeatedly mistaken ANC for transparency!

I am using AirPod pro 2 with firmware 7B21, (with iPhone 13pro, ios18.1),in my case it is blocking all background noises(even if ANC is off). Is there anyone facing same issue?

Same for me... Significant degradation for the ANC. Please Apple, fix this. I think most users value good noise cancellation more than any other feature.

I am also experiencing the same issue. I even tried purchasing a new set to see if maybe mine were faulty, but the new ones did the same exact thing. This is really frustrating considering my AirPods Pro 1st Gen were fantastic and I “upgraded” to the 2nd Gen for even worse performance.

Same, when I bought these a few months ago, I couldn't hear my son talking to me sitting in front of me. I can now hear him from another room.

Factory reset, deleted and repaired with the same problem.

it started about a month ago.