AirPod Pro Microphone Call Quality

I bought two pairs of Airpods pro (December 2019) partly for music, but mainly for making calls. They are absolutely terrible, every call I make the person at the other ends complains that they cant here me, they say the sound is coming and going (cutting in and out) and that it sounds like I am going through a tunnel. It has gotten to the stage where I have to pull over in may car to take a call manually on the phone. I use my phone a lot for business and business clients are saying the same thing, that the sound is terrible. I switched to the second pair to see was it a fault with the first pair and they were just as bad. I brought them back to iConnect (Apple Store) and they said that they have never had any complaints. However I find this strange as there are so many forums out there where people are complaining of the same thing.

I went back to using the original AirPods as they were better, I know its not an issue with my iPhone pro max as the old AirPods and 3 other bluetooth devices are perfect.

***UPDATE*** issue was caused by an update, which they took down but cannot revert if your pod case updated prior. If you turn noise canceling off the Headset should work normally but if you turn the noise canceling on it amplifies all that cancellation into the microphone somehow. I’m probably not explaining it super well but the short-term fixes turn off the noise canceling feature when you need to make a phone call.

The counterfit cases I had mentioned were bought in Authorized Apple stores and verified with Apple using using the Serial Number. The counterfiters have found ways to get into several stores, specially outside the US. Those copies are so identical that can fool anyone.

Ignorance is basically lack of information, the more information you have, the better. Stupidity is based on lack of common sense to find a real root cause.

Verifing yourself that you do not have a counterfit product is just the first step of a Scientific Root Cause Analysis. You will be surprised how many people in this forum may have one.

(just saw this mentioned three pages ago, sorry for dupe..)

Interesting troubleshooting step is to see if the problem is for both left and right microphones. In settings > bluetooth > airpods pro, near the bottom is an option to choose to "auto select" the mic, or always use the left mic, or always the right mic. This is on iOS 14.

Recording some voice memos with either left or right microphone, I find that my right microphone seems broken, or at least produces way worse audio quality than the left one. As in "No wonder people on the other end of the call give up". Given that it's just one of them, I'm afraid this means a hardware issue with at least one of the three (?) mics in the right pod.

Curious if others here have the same problem in both pods, or just in one of them, and if/how Apple took care of it.

Not sure if this issue was resolved as I’ve had the same problem for a while now. I’ve read through some comments but haven’t seen any solutions. However, I did stumble across something and I hope Apple might be reading this.

What I’ve done was use only one AirPod pro, the right ear. As most of use tend to use the right ear to take calls. I’ve made sure that in accessibilities, under AirPods, that the noise cancellation is on for one air pod. I then proceeded to record a voice memo under noise conditions and found it solved the problem. I even went on a call and it was working properly, the other person could hear me perfectly. I haven’t tried the left ear but I’m assuming that it will work just the same.

I am sensing that when both AirPods are in, the software is getting confused between selecting a mic and cancelling background noise. Whilst with one AirPod, it works like it suppose to.

Apple if you’re reading this, please address this issue and provide a patch. I’m not 100% that this is the cause, but it’s a firm start.

Same issue, my use case is walk in the park - recipient of the call can hear any other sounds instead of my voice. In addition to this, any sound from my end disappears for recipient during even slight wind. This never happened on earpods 1 and 2 non pro. Support routed me to repair which obviously did not help during covid instead of refunding (purchased through amazon and their refund time is done already). It is ridiculous to see apple still selling the product with problem affecting each pair of pro being sold. That is fraud. I dont care about money i have spent on this particular pair. Quality issues are across each apple device i bought for last three years. Iphone 11 pro camera has light glare and reflection issue, headphones does not work for calls, 2 macbooks pro 2018 loses hdmi connection, bluetooth connection to any mouse and keyboard and overheat and turn off. I guess time to dump apple for good.

For a "Pro" device the call quality is very poor, when out walking the dog people struggle to hear me as my volume drops but cars passing are amplified. I upgraded to these from my old AirPods. I think Apple focused all their efforts in sound cancellation in the ear but forgot the mic for calls.

These are only usable in a quiet room, poor for business calls. I don't think there will be a fix for them.

I have the exact same problem. I’ve been in contact with Apple “senior advisors” about this for couple of months and there have been no working solution. They clearly don’t know how to solve this. I have Apple Care so they even changed my pods once but the problem is still there. This is a major issue in Air Pod Pros. I won’t recommend this product to anyone!

Ok so I’ve got some of my experiences to add to this- I’ve had a pair of AirPod Pros since they were first released and primarily use them for listening to stuff rather than phone calls. That said, on Monday I went to Sydney and was walking through the busy streets and made a couple of phone calls to my wife while I was there and straight away she was saying that she couldn’t hear me over the background noise. I tried various settings with ANC, transparency mode etc and resetting with no improvement.

Similar to others on here I believe the algorithm that filters the microphone output in the AirPods is not doing its job.

I'm having the same issue, I'm about to return them. This is ridiculous that we are having this issue for the cost of the headphones. It's unacceptable. Feel free to have someone contact me at njcromartie@gmail.com.

Same here! I listen to music but not as much as I talk! I’m so disappointed with them! I still have to carry around a corded headphone set so I can make calls! So angry and upset about it! And they are going to do nothing! All of this is just us shouting in a black hole! No one is listening!

I started having this problem since last month, once my AirPods Pro were around 6 months of use. Not only the microphone was underperforming in calls, sometimes there was a weird buzz coming from the right Airpod. The worst part of all is that it comes from thin air, without any common cause (water damage). I tried some of the solutions , such as forgetting and re-remembering the AirPods, but nothing worked so I give up and went to the repairing center.

In the end, they just changed the AirPods, so I suspect this is quite a common bug in the Pros and since they can’t open them apart, the best way is to just replace them.

I strongly recommend if you still want to buy these, buying also the Apple Care +, to cover these repairs after warranty, otherwise I would have spent around 100 dollars just for replacement....

This is a bit old but I hope this will work for people in the future:

I rang apple and they told me I had to send only the left and right AirPods off and keep the accessories. They hold £170 (Around $229.37) and I've not send them off yet but I help this helps you.

That has been tried a million times and has not helped. The only promising suggestion came from SDAntigua on the previous page:

Air pods and more so Airpods pro are great at reducing ambient sound and wind noise, however sometimes they reduce the wind noise so much that the voice disappears also, this is worse on the Airpod pros that the standard ones. This can be changed in "Accessibility" not under the air pods settings.

Try -

Settings - Accessibility - Audio visual - Phone noise cancellation - Off

Or on older ios

Settings - General - Accessibility - Phone noise cancellation - Off

Apple refuses to fix or acknowledge the issue. I had mine for two days before sending them in, they sat there for 3 weeks before they looked at them and in less than a day their response was “there’s nothing wrong with them”. So apparently we’re making this up?