How I discovered my left AirPod was bad

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/how-i-discovered-my-left-airpod-was-bad

by geerlingguy • 9 years ago

145 61 9 years ago

Thanks for the hint with the Bluetooth Explorer!

It's one of those random apps that you'd never even think about unless you hear it mentioned deep in a thread on some random forum... I think it was mentioned in a rather old MacRumors thread discussing Logitech mouse interference. Definitely a good tool to have around, and saved me buying or borrowing an expensive spectrum analyzer :)

jasonkostempski2• 9 years ago

I'm guessing lessons won't be learned here until this happens out of warranty. Headphones shouldn't be this complicated.

icebraining3• 9 years ago

Well, your AM receiver wouldn't support them anyway.

jasonkostempski2• 9 years ago

HA! I do listen to AM radio quite a bit. They play the best, that have stood the test.

wyager• 9 years ago

In my dream world, Apple would make some sort of standardized bluetooth receiver similar to AirPods minus the actual audio hardware. It would just be the transceiver, electronics, sensors, and DAC. Then you could attach it (via e.g. a UE or Shure audio cable connector) to whatever IEMs you wanted.

This would not only address the fact that the actual audio on apple buds is very mediocre, but would also allow for some separation of concerns and easier replaceability/customizability.

2muchcoffeeman• 9 years ago

They already make things like that. https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Bluetooth-Transmitter-Receiver-...

Some companies like Westone, also make a replacement bluetooth cable since their IEMs all have replaceable cables. https://www.amazon.com/Westone-MMCX-Bluetooth-Cable-78548/dp...

I am pretty sure the correct answer is: Stop making phones so thing and bring back the 3.5 headphone jack.

If the 3.5 really is a hindrance, come up with a connector that allows a simple adaptor to 3.5 jacks and still allows cabled charging. I already have a couple of L-adaptors for my headphones with straight connectors, so carrying a 3.5-to-Lightning doesn't bother me. But not being able to charge at the same time. WTF?

iPhone SE forever!

Razengan• 9 years ago

the actual audio on apple buds is very mediocre

I for one find it to be more than adequate and actually good in fact.

wtbob• 9 years ago

What makes you think people who buy AirPods would keep headphones after the warranty period? One doesn't want to be seen in last year's headphones^WAirPods, after all!

I suppose it's kinda genius of Apple, turning a simple pair of headphones which can last for decades into a fragile piece of microelectronics with a life expectancy of years at best, months at worst. Not really what I'd call 'courage,' though.

josho• 9 years ago

I can walk about 50-60' while listening to music with no dropouts!

What kind of magic are these things? My bluetooth connection from my phone to headphones or the car will start to drop if too much of my body gets in between the radios.

geerlingguy5• 9 years ago

I should clarify - that's in the basement with just a few walls and still underground (in an inner-ring suburb). We also don't have a cordless phone, satellite, or other typical 2.4 Ghz devices that cause much interference (besides a few older wifi devices on the 802.11g network).

If you're in a more urban environment, apartment buildings, or have plaster or other types of walls (mine are drywall and studs), you're luck will go down considerably.

lathiat3• 9 years ago

I was having similar behavior with my LG HBS800.. with my AirPods I can go almost anywhere in my house. The LGs would drop out as soon as I went around a wall corner - and sometimes dropped out when walking.

The LGs are the neckband variety, I guess that right on top of a water sack is the wrong place to sit the receiver and out the side of your ear isn't bad.

geerlingguy5• 9 years ago

Yeah, I previously had a different LG headset, and it had major issues depending on my orientation towards my computer; it seems the AirPods are more optimally located on the body for a clear signal, or maybe the antennae are just that much better.

icebraining3• 9 years ago

Human bodies are actually quite good at blocking Bluetooth. My $15 no-brand BT headphones can handle three walls in between my Nexus tablet and them, but putting it in my back pocket is enough to get dropped packets.

grenoire• 9 years ago

You contain a whole lot of water, and that alone does the job (of messing up the connection).

erelde• 9 years ago

Is that inches or feet? With my bose qc35 I can walk 5 to 10 meters away from my phone/computer. (10 if clear view, 5 if wall)

1.5 meters seems very little and 18 meters seems too much.

plorkyeran• 9 years ago

Single quote is feet and double is inches, so 18 meters.

Negitivefrags• 9 years ago

At work I can leave my phone in my office and go get a drink from the kitchen without the audio dropping out. It's probably a good 15 meters away with 2 walls in between.

spike021• 9 years ago

I'm jealous. With my QC35 if I walk more than about 10 feet the connection gets very stuttery.

matwood• 9 years ago

I have a pair of JLabs BT earbuds and routinely go 30'-40' without any problems. Typically at the gym I leave my phone in my bag and will leave my bag at one station while I superset at another.

Normally I loop the earbud connecting wire in front instead of behind my neck because it gets in the way for squats.

cyberferret• 9 years ago

I have a set of Plantronics sports bluetooth headphones, and I can routinely walk 30 or 40 feet away from my iMac or phone and still hear them OK. I can even go to the bathroom which is outside my office are and in another room across a hall and still enjoy music/podcasts.

Physical walls are of course, the major factor in signal loss, rather than pure distance. It seems 2 walls between my headphones and the host are OK, but 3 walls is pushing the friendship a little.

snuxoll• 9 years ago

My Jabra Halo Smart can function across the house pretty well as long as the device it's paired with has an adequate raido (see: my iPhone 7+, but not the Intel wireless chipset in my ThinkPad W540).

I'm rather impressed with more recent bluetooth headsets, the range isn't too much worse than my Plantronics DECT headset.

jasikpark• 9 years ago

The actual Bluetooth connection is coming from the case, which allows it to have a stronger signal due to a larger antenna and battery.

djrogers• 9 years ago

Nope, that's not how AirPods work. In fact he case has NO Bluetooth capability in it - even reporting its battery state only works if one of the AirPods is in it.

Washuu2• 9 years ago

It all really depends on the device hardware and what interference they see.

My iPhone to Subaru OEM radio: Drops out if my I swipe my hand over the phone in my pocket while sitting in the seat.

My iPhone to Pioneer aftermarket radio: I can be walking well into the house before it finally drops off.

Dualshock 4 controller with Bluetooth adapter plugged into the computer: Struggles to stay connected.(Due to motherboard interference.)

Dualshock 4 controller with Bluetooth adapter plugged into an USB hub a few feet away: I can play games I can't even see through floors.

ambivalence• 9 years ago

Report the Bluetooth problem at the Subaru service. When my wife drives back from work, our '15 Forester pairs with my phone on the kitchen table as soon as my wife stops the car in front of the house. Easily 15 feet and there's walls and the car's chassis between us.

This is pretty hilarious by the way because if the phone just about pairs and she turns the car off, iPhone keeps playing the music, just switching to the internal speaker. We have a running joke about her "walk-in theme playing".

rconti3• 9 years ago

Sometime in the past couple of years, Bluetooth turned into magic.

It went from something that had range measured in inches, constant static, incessant pairing headaches.. to something with incredible range, throughput, and connectivity.

I've got a Tivoli Audio bluetooth speaker from about 2009 that's maddening to use. I have to switch bluetooth on and off on my phone, and switch the device on and off about 10 times before I get the dreaded "failed to connect" doesn't pop up, and it actually finds the damn thing.

But now my iPhone's connected to my fitbit and apple watch all day long, can send usably high datarates to the watch (hell, it can even show the live camera viewfinder from my phone on the watch screen!), and has multi-wall-penetrating range. When I hop in my car and flip off my headphones, the music or phone call picks up on my car's audio system almost seamlessly. It's really amazing.

rconti3• 9 years ago

Forgot to add, I recently bought some Outdoor Tech Chips bluetooth speakers for use in my ski helmet. The damn things lost connection with line-of-sight and about 3ft between my head and my phone in the pocket. If I sat down, they dropped. If I turned my head right instead of left, they crackled and stuttered. It felt like 2002 all over again. Returned, replaced with Sena Snowtalk.

Bombthecat• 9 years ago

After the second paragraph I knew apple will come in :)

lathiat3• 9 years ago

Great article, a few people have complained about drop-outs that others are not seeing - I wonder if this is a semi-common problem?

rahilsondhi2• 9 years ago

I have a ton of lag when I use my Bose Bluetooth speaker with my MacBook Pro, or when I airplay to my Apple TV. I tried using Bluetooth Explorer, but I can't figure out what's causing the interference. Anyone have tips on how to debug this?

H4CK3RM4N• 9 years ago

From my experience, macOS just seems to be really conservative with avoiding drop-outs in the audio. Are you using the speakers for music, or more general use? I've found it tends to value quality over responsiveness with music in particular.

rahilsondhi2• 9 years ago

It's for music.

tuxxy• 9 years ago

Maybe someone can answer this:

Why isn't there some sort of cache on the earbuds that allows the device to send the packets to it and buffer as needed (for, say, music)?

grav• 9 years ago

There is. It's just not always large enough.

0x0• 9 years ago

It would only work for music; for video or games or anything else a large buffer would mean terribly unsynchronized and delayed audio. Humans will feel something is off with just a few tens of milliseconds of buffer.

lathiat3• 9 years ago

Modern audio systems actually do work like this, here's a good write up from PulseAudio about dynamic buffer sizes and resampling when a new sound comes in

I do not know how a2dp works and if it supports such buffers though.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html

magniturd• 9 years ago

all this for headphones!

adventurer• 9 years ago

Are you in with the in-crowd?

Ezhik• 9 years ago

Well, since we are going to have a headphone jack debate at some point in this thread anyway, I've got a question.

How are wireless headphones dealing with something as simple as switching to a different device? I can just replug my wired headphones, but what about wireless? I know AirPods do some of that W1 magic, but that's only if you are dealing with Apple devices. What if I just randomly show up to a friend's house with my wireless headphones and want to listen to music on his ThinkPad?

jarcoal• 9 years ago

You have to re-pair them. So not as easy as plugging in.

quartz• 9 years ago

Varies by device but it's basically just repairing Bluetooth. I have a pair of Marshall wireless headphones and double-clicking the button on the right earphone puts them into pairing mode. From there it's two clicks on a MacBook to pair from the Bluetooth menu or a few more than that to pair to a mobile device.

TylerE• 9 years ago

Can I just take a moment to say how hilarious it is that all the guitar companies have licensed their name out for consumer audio products?

The audio system in my car is "Fender".

galuano1• 9 years ago

My QC35s rememeber a few devices and connect to a diff one on command ( the power button doubles as pair / switch device)

geerlingguy5• 9 years ago

For the AirPods in particular, there's a pairing button on the charging case—to pair with a new device, you hold that button a few seconds with the lid open, then it goes into pairing mode. Pair it like any other bluetooth device.

tlow• 9 years ago

Patented in 2014.

mercer• 9 years ago

As others have said, the first time you'd have to pair the device (which makes sense).

Once paired, my experience is that at least with the AirPods, pairing with 'regular' bluetooth devices, while not instant, is pretty quick and painless. I'm not entirely sure if that's because 1) bluetooth technology improved in general, 2) the W1 chip somehow improves 'regular' switching, or 3) or my idea of 'quick and painless' deviates from the norm, but I suspect 1 to be most likely.

reddytowns• 9 years ago

I love the saccharine tone of the article. If this happened to another brand of earphones and the guy was dealing with a different electronics store, it would be filled with rage and tears.

gergles• 9 years ago

Yep. I had similar problems with my AirPods and wasn't about to be Apple's debugger for free for hours on end - I just returned them.

That doesn't make for as interesting a story, but it's clear they were rushed out the door (poor soldering according to the teardowns, tons of problems like this report, extremely limited supply months later) and it really makes me wonder about the future of Apple when they can't even nail hardware anymore.

I know the canard of "don't buy V1 of an Apple product" but it seemed to have been better in recent years. Until this, at least.

icebraining3• 9 years ago

Or maybe he's just not that kind of guy? Looking back at his blog posts, he recently had a similar problem with TP-Link USB hub and I don't see any rage or tears.

cm2187• 9 years ago

Are these things as leaky as the headphones that come with a new iphone? The reason those are unsuitable in a work environment is that your colleagues will hear almost as much your music as you do.

zaroth• 9 years ago

That was a really interesting read, and almost amazing the lengths that Jeff was willing to go to debug the problem. But it's also worth considering, how much work was possibly wasted during this arduous debug process? I say that not to knock the work Jeff did, but really to appreciate the creative process which is "debugging" and this is a great example of where a different strategy could save a lot of time.

Anytime you debug a problem, you create in your mind a list of likely candidates for the problem, and sort them based on a combination of how likely the problem is being caused by 'X' multiplied by how hard it is to prove the problem is not caused by 'X'.

I may have missed something, but from the story it seems like testing with one AirBud versus the other AirBud active would have isolated the problem immediately to the left pod. If you see different performance on left vs. right pod, you know immediately the problem almost certainly has nothing to do with your RF environment. So before going to extreme lengths to modify the RF environment, you absolutely must ask yourself; how can I prove the problem is not RF?

Well, you have one shared RF environment. So naturally you need two or more DUTs (device under test) to run the test against and see if the problem is consistent across different DUTs.

What's so neat about this particular case is that Jeff already had two DUTs, since the pods can apparently operate completely independently. Having two DUTs, it was a massive missed opportunity to test them independently before going down the RF rat hole.

Please don't read this as a critique of Jeff, his write-up is a great place for learning to happen!

bontoJR• 9 years ago

I love these kind of articles. For some people it might be a waste of time, but to me is really good to see such amazing willingness to discover the problem. I am tempted to get a pair of AirPods, not totally sure yet, but if in the future I will get one, I will definitely remember this post in case I have troubles with them.

Well done!

How I discovered my left AirPod was bad

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