Apple’s VP of Acoustics Discusses AirPods Bluetooth Limitations and More During Interview

Apple’s VP of Acoustics Gary Geaves and Eric Treski from the Product Marketing Team sat down with What HiFi to discuss the technology supporting the company’s wireless earbuds. Additionally, the duo opened up about the realistic limitations Bluetooth lends.

The full interview between What HiFi, Geaves, and Treski is very interesting and provides a rare peek behind the curtain of Apple and its products. Although AirPods have been a success for the company, the technology used may be limiting the experience. When asked whether Bluetooth, in particular, holds the wireless earbuds and its listening experience back, Geaves explains that Apple’s goal is to allow for more bandwidth.

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and… I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

Geaves and Treski also discuss how in-sync the Acoustic team is in working with the Apple Music Team, GarageBand, Logic, music engineers and artists. The has helped shape Apple’s approach to Spatial Audio. “We have whole teams of people who deal with the kind of interaction between engineering and artistic folks – they don’t let me near artistic folks because I’m too much of a fan, to be honest with you – but we do take feedback from people delivering the content,” Geaves says.