Apple launches hearing protection for AirPods Pro 2 in Canada

Apple is working on bringing its suite of hearing health features to AirPods Pro 2, and the first part of that is launching today to help people use their AirPods Pro to protect their hearing in loud environments.

This feature is called ‘Hearing Protection,’ and it uses the AirPods Pro to bring the noise level down to something that won’t harm your eardrums when in noisy environments like a concert or a loud construction site. It does this by passively blocking out noise using the silicon ear tips and then letting noise back in at a reasonable volume via the microphones. It’s kind of like a smarter transparency mode that works to make sure you aren’t blowing out your eardrums.

I’ve been testing the feature, and it’s so subtle in regular environments that it’s hard to notice it working. However, it’s surprising how well they work once you take your buds out and get blasted with sound. I didn’t have these in time for a concert I was at recently, but blaring music on all the speakers in my house and walking around with my AirPods in ‘Transparency’ mode, I thought they weren’t working, because the music sounded loud and clear in my ears, but when I removed them the sound was roughly twice as loud as I was experiencing through the AirPods Pro 2.

If you want to block out all sounds, ANC still works the best, but if you work in a loud location or frequent concerts, something like this is invaluable since you can still hear the world around you clearly, but behind the scenes, the earbuds are reducing the volume. This is on by default if you have your AirPods Pro set to Transpacenry or Adaptive modes, although the adaptive mode will dampen the loud sounds even more since its job is to lower (and sometimes cancel out) the volume of recurring loud sounds.

This also builds on an existing AirPods feature that lowers the volume of audio coming from your iPhone or other Apple devices when it exceeds a set decibel limit. Now, with Hearing protection, this extends to the real world as well. It’s certified to lower sounds that are up to 110 decibels, but it should help with louder sounds as well, though it may not work as well.

Overall, this illustrates one of my favourite things about AirPods Pro 2. Apple released them in 2022; since then, they’ve been updated with many neat features like Adaptive Audio and more. There’s no need to keep replacing them since they work so well, and it’s nice to see Apple continue to make them better with software.  Ideally, they’ll get even better in Canada soon if Apple is able to bring the really interesting hearing aid feature to them as well.