During a tour of Apple’s Audio Lab near the Steve Jobs Theater, Apple offered TechRadar a rare inside look at how it achieves the acclaimed sound quality of its AirPods Pro 3.
The company showed off its advanced audio facilities, including a room that may be among the quietest in the world, while demonstrating the lengths it goes to ensure every sound from its products meets exacting standards.
To understand how Apple engineers manage to deliver crisp bass, mids, highs, and separation rivaling over-ear headphones on the tiny AirPods Pro 3, the company showed spaces within the Audio Lab dedicated to every dimension of sound reproduction and silence.
Among these spaces was an anechoic chamber a room built to nearly eliminate echo or ambient noise by using walls ceiling and floor lined with foam wedges, and a suspended platform so sound reflections are swallowed rather than bounced back. Inside this chamber, Apple tests for any unintended noise from its own products using extreme environments where even a hand clap sounds muffled and echoes are absent.
Engineers bring in prototypes of earbuds and work to remove tiny mechanical or electronic noises that an untrained ear might never notice but which can degrade immersion in audio or spatial sound modes.
The lab layout includes tuning studios and booths named evocatively Nocturn Sound City among others. These spaces serve not only for output tuning Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency mode but also for verifying spatial audio performance. Apple has built rooms with spherical speaker arrays and rotating chairs so that engineers can replicate how sound arrives at listeners ears from different directions.
Another part of the lab features hearing test instruments including medical grade equipment and a reference system that Apple uses to test whether the AirPods Pro clinical hearing test matches actual human hearing in a medical scenario.
The tour left the visitor with a strong impression that Apple’s obsession with silence as well as sound is fundamental to its audio identity.
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