I am considering getting open ear buds for use on the PC while gaming and meetings. I have razer over ear head phones, they work well but they also cut me off from the rest of the family/house environment. I have tried in ear buds but they do the same and they irritate my ear canal.
Next step is to consider open ear buds. While doing research here I have found that most of them use some kind of over the ear hook, which won’t work, because I wear glasses, all the time.
My final pick are the Apple AirPods 4. They do not sit in the canal, so no irritation. They allow for outside noise, the seem to be specced for low latency and will work for games/meetings.
I have a pair of Airpod Pro 2’s and they are phenomenal. The transparency mode works a treat, which is what you’re looking for. It uses the microphones to pass through the environmental sounds to your ears. It’s so good that they’re apparently filing it to be usable as hearing aids.
The flip side is active noise cancelling, which also works incredibly well. I use them on flights to block out most noise and to get in a good nap. I often don’t even listen to anything, I just let the ANC block out the sound for some peace and quiet.
I’m not sure if the Airpod 4’s have the transparency mode and ANC or not, but I recommend you look into the ones that have that feature.
Yeah I would also vouch for the Apple Air Pods. While I struggle with in-ear due to hurting my canal over time, and over ear hurting my ears due to glasses all the time too. I find I don’t get that with Apple variants, and I’m not an Apple fanboy.
They work perfectly fine on PC. I don’t use an EQ though, just stock settings, which sound perfectly fine. To active transparency or ANC modes you just pinch the stem. Volume control is also just swiping up and down the stem.
The Airpods 4 finally arrived but it was quite a mission to get them working. My brand new ASUS mobo has built in bluetooth but using this just had the pods breaking up with sound and being horrible.
I then plugged in a dongle and it got much better but only after I disabled the mobo BT in bios and uninstalled all the BT drivers. It still gives issues when an app wants to use the mic, like slack/teams/discord and in game, I keep having to remind windows by using the More sound settings to NOT allow applications to take control of the device. Every time.
Not impressed by the interface with windows at all but then again it is not a native windows device. I foresee many struggles. I also read that samsung has the same issues, so I guess its not just apple.
Comfort wise they are perfect, so will grin and carry the burden of windows being stupid and that there are no native drivers to interface windows BT and the earpods.
My microphone issues I can resolve with my old headset mic, which I just place in front of me but it is not ideal. Many articles/videos all say the same thing, bluetooth headsets have consistent issues with using microphones in applications, like games/discord etc since it switches the pods/headset to a microphone mode, essentially using the microphone as an output and input.
Not sure what to do now, this will be my second headset return to takealot if I do it. Not sure if they will allow it.