Airpods Pro 2 noise cancellation worse after firmware update 7A294

I thought I was going crazy. I kept checking to see if I had accidentally changed to transparency but it’s always on noise cancellation. Not only can I hear everything now, there’s a noticeable fan like sound when ANC is on for me. It’s ok when I’m listening to music but I listen to a lot of audiobooks and it just sounds bad now

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 🧐🤣

Maybe it belongs to their deeper marketing strategy? Cutting the ANC, so customers need to listen lo music much louder than before (to overlay traffic or gym noise i need to turn up the volume at least to 90 % now). And this Max Loudness leads straight into the hearing aid feature and the need to buy some new airpods than :D :D

I updated last night to ios 18.2 and I clearly realised the ANC got worse. There’s no difference anymore between „Adaptive“ and „noise cancelling „ modes.

i tested with my old and brand new AirPods Pro 2 (I had one extra from work).

See, and here I thought it was just me or my imagination that the ANC got worse. I swore that I could hear better with the ANC on rather than a few months ago where I couldn’t hear anything with it switched on.

I can hear someone talking to me clear as day whom normally I have trouble hearing with my AirPods Pro 2 off my head.

So yes, I’m experiencing this issue, too. Hopefully Apple fixes this because sometimes that feature is needed in my case.

I thought my AirPods were getting old so bought new ones. Seems it’s software issue I work in a nightclub and before my set i would relax and listen a podcast without problems, now I can not hear one word they say the noise cancellation is totally gone. Seems it’s been months without a fix do I really have to go to another brand?

User to user support forum.

Apple isn’t here and doesn’t respond to any posts here.

With tens of millions of AirPods being sold every year, a few disgruntled people on a user to user support forum means nothing.

mine are great and I’m very pleased with them.

Tja, I keep my fingers crossed for you, thats yours remain in this good anc condition.

but honestly I am sure that there are either a lot of people out there who do not notice any difference because they use their AirPods differently (louder music where the lag of high frequencies is not that obvious, or they listen in quieter environments) or the "roll out" of the ANC reduction happens incrementally.

so, the chances are high, that you already have it and dont pay attention to it or u ll be the next one.;)

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 👍

I am badly affected by this. Tried cleaning, resetting but I can hardly tell the difference between NC on and off. This was the main reason for getting the Air Pods Pro 2 and for almost a year I had zero complaints

Another using letting Apple know I am in the same boat. My wife got me Air Pros 2 for Christmas and I was so excited for the “improved” noise cancellation over the original Air Pods Pro that I own.

As soon as I tried them out of the box,

I said, “Is noise cancellation even working?”

If this does not get fixed soon I will be returning these.

Same here, mine are now picking up the sound from my room tv at low volume, that never used to happen.

would have loved if we had a slider to adjust the amount of noise canceling that we needed instead of apple deciding for us.

guess it’s time to make the switch to a better competitor.

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.

Same issue here. First time I noticed this was when noticing that I suddenly could hear the peep when pressing a code to enter at work. Before I could never hear this. Then I started noticing a lot more noise when commuting. The final blow was when I went on a plane.

I would say my airpod pro 2 is now no better noise cancelling than my 2018 Sony WH-1000XM3. And of course these have a lot better sound than the airpods.