Music on the go

A confrontation, a duel, a face-to-face, a match, or even, in more technical terms, a comparison - there’s no lack of words when you put two adversaries (or more) against one another to gauge their personalities, their strong and weak points, and, if at all possible, to decide between them.

This type of sparring isn’t common at Qobuz, if not extremely rare, but we know that enthusiasts like them—even if manufacturers like them a lot less—and if we do it today, it’s because we are in the presence of two flagship products that are priced similarly (and fairly high at that, just under €180) and aim for the same audience: trendy, unrepentant and technophile music lovers.

On our right, the expert in innovative and design-focus Hi-Tech products, Apple, with wireless earphones displayed in a small storage case also handling their charge for a total autonomy of more than 24 hours, called the AirPods.

On our left, the Rayz Plus earphones, whose appearance couldn’t be more classic, equipped with a Lightning connection, and designed by a Hi-Fi Japanese giant that wasn’t born yesterday. They know how to create quality sound as well as quality headphones and have been doing so for ages. We’re talking about Pioneer of course.

Let’s start with presentations and therefore with the expert of this subject matter, or rather the show specialist: Apple and their AirPods.

An invisible revolution, no less, is what Apple promises in its French presentation. And it’s true that these small beasts, to avoid using wires, have had to embark a true artificial intelligence in the form of a microscopic chip developed by Apple themselves and called W1 (since V1 was already registered).

Those who are brave and like to read will play with their mouse wheel and will happily scroll through the presentation page of the latest technological wonder from Apple, and others won’t have to do that and can just rely on watching two videos, one rather nice and short presenting the AirPods, and a showcase movie in cinemascope that lasts almost two hours (!) about the Apple Keynote from September 7, 2016.

We must recognize that the bitten apple brand knows how to design beautiful and attractive high-tech objects to free the informed enthusiasts from use constraints. In short, combining nice aesthetics to ergonomics is their thing.

To pair the AirPods with your iPhone, your iPad or your Mac, or even your Apple Watch, nothing could be simpler, just push the button on the storage case and they appear in the AirPlay peripherals, but they only use A2DP Bluetooth with AAC encoding (Advanced Audio Codec, which is much inferior to the aptX).

For once with Apple, AirPods can also be paired via Bluetooth with devices from other brands, and they reacted to the double tap by putting Foobar2000 on hold when we tried it, but it would seem that that’s it..

When you put them into your ears, they automatically detect that they’re in by infrared sensors and music playback is put on hold as soon as you take even one of the earphones out: it’s truly magical!

A vocal accelerometer notifies the AirPods’ W1 chip when you’re talking, while microphones pick up external noises so that they can be filtered and a quick double tap on one earphone or the other will shut down sound and automatically launch Siri, which will up and resume playback if you don’t ask it anything in the next few seconds.

Now let’s talk about sound.

Apple talks about a 'clearly superior sound'.

Not true! Here at Qobuz we’ve had never heard such bad sound!

Our beloved The Wall from Pink Floyd is almost unrecognizable, thin, at most a low step but never a wall in a million years! If bass impacts remain quite convincing when heard alone, it worsens rather quickly when things get a little more complicated and the sound becomes shrill (ouch, the children’s voices from the famous Another Brick In The Wall!), muddled, without any depth and there’s only a few voices that manage to hold their own with varying degrees of success. No need to say more, just go and listen by yourself and you’ll see.

So, AirPods are good for showing off, but bad for music, at least music as we like to hear it at Qobuz!

With their hanging wire and their Lightning connector, Pioneer’s Rayz Plus will not see their sound quality restricted by the Bluetooth’s low debit associated to the AAC encoding, while offering very pleasant ergonomics as well as an application, My Rayz, allowing for various configurations (in particular the Smart Button on its remote), some equalization and also the use of Siri.

Its cable is equipped, near its Lightning socket, with a very small box allowing you to plug in a standard Lightning USB cable and therefore to charge your iPhone or your iPad while listening to music (they’re the first Lightning earphones that offer this functionality), but also to authorize a dialogue with a computer through its USB plug.

It’s also equipped with an active noise correction that can be calibrated (this functionality can be associated to the Smart Button) and automatically shuts down the sound when you take off both earphones.

Last, and most importantly, the Rayz Plus offers a sound quality that is incomparably higher to its competitor, and we can finally listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall without grinding our teeth and hurting our ears. They took care to choose ear plugs that adapt well to ears canals, thus optimizing bass performance. We therefore benefit from a high-quality, homogeneous sound reproduction that’s detailed, with good treble staccatos which don’t saturate, even near max volume, and with good bass consistency.

Kudos to Pioneer for this device that doesn’t compromise sound quality for modernism and that can be bought in four different finishes, among which two specific ones are only available through Apple.

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