There is a genuine reason why you’re seeing the review of Apple’s haloed premium headphones at the end of February 2021 when I have been testing them since early January. I wanted to just not tell you how good they sound, but how they fare as travel companions which most reviewers haven’t been able to tell you because of limited travelling during the pandemic.

Well, I had to travel to Allahabad as two of my best friends were getting married so I did the whole 9 yards, took a flight all the way to the hinterland of Uttar Pradesh, even experienced flight delays and properly put Apple’s ballbusting Rs 59,990 headphones through the paces. Before spilling the beans, I can tell you a couple of things — they create a new category for wireless audio just like the way the iPad did for modern computing a decade ago, they look gorgeous and are built to Apple’s exacting standards and they sound expensive.

There has been a lot of chatter around their price of Rs 59,990 and its bra-case. On one side, I will be in the outlandish bunch who believes the price is not at all outlandish for what it represents in terms of technology, branding and usability but at the same time, even I am bemoaning the grotesque illogical case. The case is a pain — because you lose charge if it isn’t in it, and you can’t store any accessories, even if you’ve bought them and yes, they are highly inconvenient if you want to quickly pack away. The case also gets dirty very quickly and it provides very limited protection. Apple clearly got the case colossally wrong, but that’s a small flaw in the larger scheme of things as the AirPods Max represent the future of premium personal audio.

The AirPods Max represents a new breed of headphone which is purely wireless, has no associations with the past having the 3.5mm jack which is potentially very irksome for international travellers as it becomes incompatible with the entertainment systems of aircraft which are still based on legacy systems. But then again many travellers, especially in India on domestic flights don’t get entertainment systems. You get content beamed via WiFi on your own personal gadgets which is increasingly the way forward on even international tours. This is where the AirPods Max shines through especially if you’re using an iPhone, iPad or Mac.

They are truly unique — on most days they are amazing, but there are days when they do frustrate.

Active Noise Cancellation Of A Different Level

Before the AirPods Max came along, people who cared for the best active noise cancelling on their headphones would revert to Bose or Sony’s. The Sony WX1000xm4 particularly has become the paragon of the globetrotting wireless audio mafia.

Well, for that crowd, there is a new benchmark — AirPods Max. You get cocooned in silence when you have active noise cancellation on the AirPods Max. You do get a sense of slightly more compression but this is manageable because of the super comfortable foam ear cups. It also helps that the bass and mid-range frequencies don’t get squished because of the noise cancellation which isn’t true of Sony’s.

Then there is the case of sublime isolation that you get without the active noise cancellation. So in most situations, you don’t even need to use it. Then there is easy situating using the springy button or the user interface. And then there is the genius of the “transparency mode” which uses the 9-microphones to pull in sound from the outside so that you have spatial awareness in the case you’re out on a stroll — and you don’t want to get run over by a blue line bus.

The big thing here is just like the AirPods Pro, the implementation is so simplistic bereft of any complexity that it works for all kinds of people. For example, using the lightning to 3.5mm cable we even go some DJs to mix music using a combination of the passive cancellation and transparency mode. No other noise-cancelling headphone can replace a pro-grade DJ headphone, but the AirPods Max can give a Sennheiser HD 225 a run for its money because it sounds so good and at the same time its innovative transparency mode allows one to mix music while also hearing what the crowd is listening to.

On the flight too, it completely silenced the loud babies crying from my left while I enjoyed the new Sway podcast by Kara Swisher interviewing Bill Gates on climate change.

Computational Audio Is Here

One of the big tentpole facets of the AirPods Max is computational audio which is enabled by the presence of twin H2 chips, 40mm drivers, adaptive EQ and spatial audio. The H2 chips alone can do 9 billion operations per second which is iPhone level of computational witchcraft.

Adaptive EQ is a trick that the AirPods Max borrow from the HomePods enabling the headphones and their suite of sensors to scale your ear canal and deliver the best quality of audio possible even if the headphones moves off-centre. Your audio experience doesn’t get changed by slight movements — that’s a game-changer.

Then the general quality of the audio is significantly better than that on headphones by Bose or Sony. In the case of the AirPods, this also happens over Airplay than Bluetooth on Apple devices which also allows for better audio. It is actually on the level of some wired headphones even if you’re listing to 320kbps AAC. Since Apple hasn’t added an option for lossless audio, this is a big miss, but one can see it coming. Considering Amazon and Spotify have a lossless service, Apple could be building one of its own which could be enabled on the AirPods Max with just a software update -- the probability of this happening is very high.

Generally, I’d say the sound quality is sweet -- slightly coloured to make the music pop a bit but it sounds balanced, nuanced and detailed with an epic soundstage with all kinds of audio. It is a notch above most wireless headphones that are in the market, even ones at its price by people like Focal Audio, B&W, Grado etc -- its comparison isn’t the Bose and Sony products of this world because those products excel more at active noise cancellation than sonic fidelity.

Then there is spatial audio which works with Apple TV+ on iOS devices that also have gyroscopes and accelerometers. In a movie like Greyhound, you can sense the magic of spatial audio and Dolby Atmos and how game-changing it will be for content consumption. Apple has also added a spatial audio API for streaming services to tap into but so far Netflix and Hotstar are yet to enable it though even without it, you get a sense of immersive brilliance which you can only get with the AirPods Max.

Build Quality That Is From A Different Galaxy

Most headphones are made out of cheap plastic for two reasons — to keep the cost down and to make them light. The AirPods Max are neither cheap nor light. Apple makes liberal use of metal — with stainless steel in the telescopic band and anodised aluminium on the drivers and a magnetically removable memory foam on the ear cups. This makes them very heavy art 385 grams too.

The build quality is undeniably from another galaxy. At the same time to offset the disadvantage of the weight you have a mesh fabric on the headband which balances the weight expertly while you’re either sitting or inside a flight. They seem weightless. The weight emerges if you try to take them out for a jog or are strolling across the streets wearing them. Then they start to move around. In this kind of scenario, they do sound great as you have adaptive EQ to save the day, but from a comfort perspective, they become awkward, just because they are made out of heavy materials.

Apple has added a Digital Crown like radial-crown on the right side of the headphone which allows you to control the volume. Initially, people were sceptical of this solution but in use, it is utterly elegant. It even makes a clicking sound allowing you to know the sweep of the volume change which happens very gradually giving you great control over the volume. This works better than any touch-based interface that's doing the rounds on modern headphones.

The one area where the build quality isn’t up to the mark is that bra-case. It is made out of this finicky faux leather-like material which will get dirty very fast and it will not protect the mesh band or the base of the headphone which has strange cutouts that allow for you to attach the lighting cable.

Quirks Of An Apple Gadget Galore

The AirPods Max would have been insanely good, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, if they hadn’t had typical and atypical Apple quirks. For instance, there is no on-off switch. You need to put them back in the case to turn them off or to enable the low power mode. Since their battery life is 33 per cent inferior to the Sony or Bose wireless headphones and since they can’t be used passively (without power) just with a cable, this is a big problem.

And yes, you get the lighting connector and no 3.5mm jack. This is problematic because the headphones don’t work with all lightning to 3.5mm cables, nor do they have the jack, it becomes complicated. They also don’t come with an airline adapter kit — so to make them work with an entertainment system of an airline, you need the Apple lighting to 3.5mm cable and an airline adaptor which normally comes with most headphones.

AirPods Max-like all Apple audio products work best with Apple gadgets because of AirPlay. They work better on iOS gadgets better than even the Mac because spatial audio isn’t possible as there are no accelerometers and gyroscopes on Macs. On an Android phone, you can still get spatial audio over Bluetooth but the syncing isn’t as seamless nor is the audio — the same goes for a Windows notebook, just that you again don’t get spatial audio as well.

AirPods Max Are Weird Yet Amazing

The AirPods Max are the most well built wireless headphones that I have tested in the last 5 years. They are also the nicest sounding headphones I’ve tested in 3 years with the best active noise cancellation system I’ve ever used. But their weird quirks mean that I’ve had to buy accessories like lightning to a 3.5mm cable, a new case, and an airline adaptor to make them work my way. If you don’t need all these things, then chances are you already don’t need the AirPods Max — and that’s the conundrum they leave you behind with. The AirPods Max will delight you as no wireless headphone has — but you will need to meet it halfway and also break your bank. If you’re cool with that then they represent the future of wireless audio that many legacy audio companies haven’t seen yet. Otherwise, more affordable wireless noise-cancelling headphones like the Sony WX1000xm4 should be on your radar or if you're looking for something more audiophile-grade which can be paired up with a DAC like the HiFiMan Ananda.