Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In recent years, TWS true wireless headphones have become the most mainstream category in the headphone market because of their great convenience. According to the research data of China Business Industry Research Institute, the output value of China's wireless headphones will reach 124.6 billion yuan in 2022, 4.5 times that of wired headphones, of which more than six Chengdu are real wireless headphones.

When it comes to real wireless headphones, many friends may first think of its founder, the Apple AirPods series. At its autumn launch in early September, Apple unveiled a new generation of AirPods Pro 2. It is worth mentioning that this is the first time that Apple has updated its AirPods Pro product line in three years. During this period, other brands have not stopped, and their high-end real wireless headphones have made great progress both in terms of product features and technology. Huawei's FreeBuds series is a typical example. Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2, which they released in July this year, is already comparable to Apple's AirPods Pro 2, and has even surpassed it in some ways, such as audio quality.

With the joint efforts of major brands, there is no doubt about the convenience of TWS true wireless headphones in the experience of entering the era of high-definition audio, but there has always been a common weakness compared with traditional wired headphones, that is, audio quality. After all, the loss of audio information in wireless transmission is a problem that is difficult to overcome. "Sound quality can only listen to sound" has also become a mantra for many people to make fun of real wireless headphones.

However, for headphones, sound quality is always a very important function point. According to a report by research agency StrategyAnalytics, active noise reduction, transparent mode and spatial audio are the most important features that consumers pay most attention to when buying TWS true wireless headphones, and these features can also be summarized as audio quality.

Therefore, solving the problem of sound quality has become the most critical step for true wireless headphones to enter a new stage of development.

The good news is that many brands of real wireless headphones are aware of this problem and are making continuous efforts for the "good sound" of real wireless headphones. You can clearly feel that in the past year, various manufacturers have been improving the sound effect of TWS real wireless headphones, and improving sound quality has almost become a common topic for the whole industry. To borrow the concept of video, if the sound performance of real wireless headphones was smooth in the past, it is now in high definition.

Yes, the era of high-definition audio that belongs to real wireless headphones has arrived.

Compared with the advantages, the road of HD audio era is more than one HD audio, which is the general trend of TWS true wireless headset industry, but how to understand HD audio and how to achieve it? Different brands have different paths.

According to what we introduced earlier, "HD audio" can actually be divided into three points:

Transmission and codec-high fidelity

Noise reduction-active noise reduction, penetration mode

Sense of hearing-spatial audio, tuning, etc.

CTOnews.com believes that the high-definition audio we pursue is nothing more than starting from these three levels.

So how to achieve it? There are indeed differences in the technical routes of different brands. However, we believe that, in general, it can be divided into two categories: one is Apple, which takes computing audio as the core, and has a strong ability to combine chips with algorithms, but does not pursue the extreme in the specific acoustic configuration.

The other is represented by Huawei FreeBuds Pro series, which makes a good balance in acoustic configuration and calculation of audio, and sends force with both hands.

How to put it exactly? It just so happens that both Huawei and Apple have just launched their new "Pro" real wireless headphones, so let's compare Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 with Apple AirPods Pro 2.

1. Transmission and codec are the first part of transmission and codec. We know that most of the true wireless headphones are Bluetooth-based. Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 supports Bluetooth 5.2 transmission, while Apple AirPods Pro 2 supports Bluetooth 5.3. Compared with Bluetooth 5.2, Bluetooth 5.3 is mainly enhanced in low-rate transmission and encryption control, but it has nothing to do with the sound quality of headphones. So this difference is basically negligible.

The focus is on coding and decoding. The basic work flow of the true wireless headset is that the front end encodes and compresses the sound information, then transmits it to the headset through Bluetooth, and then decodes and plays the sound information. The process of encoding and decoding involves the "loss" of sound source information, that is, what we often say is lossy and lossless, so it is closely related to the final sound quality performance.

Apple AirPods Pro 2 uses the ancestral AAC codec (Advanced Audio Coding) for many years, and the bit rate in Apple products is about 256 Kbps. Although this codec scheme is good, it is really old, and it is difficult to meet the current demand for high-definition sound quality.

Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 supports LDAC and L2HC 2.0 dual HD audio codec protocols. LDAC is a kind of audio coding developed by Sony, which can achieve the highest bit rate of 990Kbps and high-resolution audio of 24bit / 96kHz.

L2HC is a wireless audio coding technology developed by Huawei. L2HC 2.0 can achieve audio transmission rate as high as 960Kbps, and has a more flexible rate space than LDAC. In some scenarios with strong interference, it can adapt to a lower bit rate, thus taking into account the sound quality and stutter problems.

With support for LDAC and L2HC 2.0 dual HD protocols, it is clear that Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 can better reduce the loss of sound source information, thus making the sound more fidelity and nearly lossless, which can really meet everyone's demand for HD audio. Apple AirPods Pro 2 does lag behind on this point, but they take a different approach, which we'll talk about next.

2, noise reduction in noise reduction, can reflect the difference between AirPods Pro 2 and FreeBuds Pro 2 in the way of thinking, first of all, Apple, although the codec protocol is not as good as other high-end wireless headphones, but they will focus on the secondary processing of sound, that is, the calculation of audio, the advantage lies in "computing".

In terms of noise reduction, AirPods Pro 2 detects the noise outside and inside the headset through a two-way microphone, and then emits anti-noise sound waves to counteract the noise with the powerful computing power of its own H2 chip. In this process, the core advantage of AirPods Pro 2 lies in the organic combination of powerful self-developed H2 chip and self-developed algorithm to achieve unimaginable computing power, thus improving the effect of noise reduction.

Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2's plan is different. First of all, it has a three-dimensional array of three microphones, plus a bone conduction microphone designed for voice noise reduction, a total of four microphones, through a more perfect combination of hardware, to assist in more immersive noise reduction, which can achieve the maximum noise reduction depth of 47dB.

In particular, when it comes to call noise reduction, four microphones still have considerable advantages, coupled with hundreds of millions of sample DNN calculations, so that Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 can achieve excellent quiet calls.

In addition, FreeBuds Pro 2 has a functional advantage, that is, it can achieve intelligent dynamic noise reduction. It can intelligently identify your environment, and then automatically switch to the matching noise reduction mode, making the noise reduction experience more intelligent and convenient.

To sum up, AirPods Pro 2 and FreeBuds Pro 2 can be said to have the same goal, and they have different ideas, but both have achieved excellent noise reduction effect and experience, which is also caused by the different ecological characteristics behind Apple and Huawei.

3. The sense of listening is actually the most direct presentation of a headset with or without a good sound in front of consumers. Here we are divided into tuning and spatial audio.

The first is tuning, speaking of which, I believe many friends will immediately think of Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2's Divale joint tuning. Indeed, through cooperation with professional acoustics brand Divare, Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 has obtained more professional acoustic technology, thus achieving pure sound quality with surging bass and rich details.

While Apple AirPods Pro 2 is still based on the advantages of its H2 chip, in order to give users a better sense of hearing, it uses a powerful adaptive algorithm to perform real-time calculations according to the shape of the user's ear, so that every detail of the sound can please the user's ear. This process will be very difficult to complete without the cooperation of H2 chip. This is where Apple can focus on computing audio.

While FreeBuds Pro 2 focuses on high-definition space audio, this is Huawei's first headset to support Audio Vivid space audio, supporting 3D sound, surround sound and stereo sources. It uses Huawei's self-developed scene-based spatial audio field rendering engine to provide three kinds of spatial audio sound modes: audio theater, cinema and concert hall, matching the original sound source scene and deducing a realistic sense of presence.

It is worth mentioning that in terms of stereo sound, AirPods Pro 2 supports Dolby panoramic sound, while FreeBuds Pro 2 is Audio Vivid, both of which are 3D audio standards with their own advantages. But Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 also integrates its own technology on the basis of meeting the Audio Vivid, thus making the immersion of spatial audio even further.

In terms of head tracking, Huawei FreeBuds Pro2 is equipped with a six-axis attitude sensor, which can reshape the position of the sound field in real time and create a 360 °high-definition space audio surround sound.

Compared with Apple, Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 pursues the ultimate high definition and telepresence. For example, you listen to live music as if you are in a concert, and listening to audio dramas is like following the protagonist into the scene of a story. There are advantages in both directions, but if you are an immersive user, Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 may be more suitable for you.

Through the above comparison, we can find that, whether in terms of transmission, codec, noise reduction, or the final sense of hearing, Apple AirPods Pro and Huawei FreeBuds Pro represent two camps of other headphone brands, with different paths and understandings for chasing high-definition audio. In fact, the core advantage of Apple lies in the self-developed H2 chip and the strong software and hardware integration capability behind the chip, allowing it to focus and radically move towards the road of computing audio, while the core advantage of Huawei FreeBuds Pro 2 is the organic combination of "computing power" and "professional acoustics", which is relatively more "traditional" and more stable. Both of them will show their advantages in different scenarios and needs, so you can choose according to your own situation and needs.

Conclusion all roads lead to Rome, no matter how different the paths are, there is only one purpose: to promote the real wireless headset industry to enter the era of high-definition audio faster.

Like images, more than a decade ago, we could not imagine that mobile phone photography could beat card machines and rival professional cameras. But now, mobile phone images do do that, and in some ways they are ahead of professional cameras.

The same is true of real wireless headphones, with Huawei, Apple and other brands in the technology of continuous efforts, innovation, we can look forward to the future of real wireless headphones can achieve a real fever level of HiFi sound quality, so that headphones completely get rid of the shackles of wire.

From this point of view, perhaps, the era of "high-definition audio" is just the beginning, and there may be "ultra-clear audio" and "ultra-clear audio" in the future, and eventually real wireless headphones will create a "new world of sound" that you can immerse yourself in anytime, anywhere.

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