One of the greatest perks of having high-quality headphones or earphones is active noise canceling, but it’s only worthwhile if you have some form of transparency mode. With the launch of the 2nd Generation AirPods Pro, Apple improved the feature considerably with adaptive transparency. But what’s the difference between adaptive transparency and normal transparency mode?
Transparency mode is the exact opposite of active noise canceling. Tiny microphones pick up external sounds and make them audible through your earphones. Adaptive transparency enhances this feature by selectively filtering external sounds and adjusting their volumes.
On the surface, it might not seem like there’s much difference between transparency mode and adaptive transparency. Still, the difference is deeply technical, and adaptive transparency is a game-changing earphone technology. Let’s compare the two transparency functions more closely.
What Is Transparency Mode?
Transparency mode is a function that most high-end headphone manufacturers use to improve the listening experience for their customers.
Most people want the best sound quality they can get from their headphones or earphones, but external noise makes that difficult to accomplish. The more noise there is in the environment around you, the higher you must push the volume on your earphones to be able to hear clearly, which can cause hearing damage.
This has led to the quest for noise cancelation. Passive noise cancelation tries to block external sounds from entering your ear canals, while active noise cancelation intelligently counteracts external noise by canceling out specific frequencies.
Want to know more? Adaptive Transparency vs. Transparency vs. Noise Cancellation: Headphone Jargons Simplified
As great as this technology has become, it comes with specific difficulties, particularly the fact that there are some external sounds you have to hear, at least temporarily. For example, listening to traffic when you’re about to cross a busy road, hearing announcements when you’re using public transport, or having to hear when someone’s talking to you.
Previously, any of these actions required you to turn off active noise canceling or remove your earphones.
Transparency mode is a function you can enable on certain high-end headphones and earphones that will pick up external sounds with tiny microphones built into the earphones, then play those sounds back to you without interrupting your music or disabling noise cancelation.
The external noise will be played back to the user as-is. Loud noises will be loud over the earphones, while softer noises will also be soft.
What Is Adaptive Transparency?
Adaptive transparency is a relatively new technology based on standard transparency mode.
As with transparency mode, adaptive transparency picks up external sounds and plays them back to the user when active noise canceling is enabled on their earphones. It allows them to have better environmental awareness, hear announcements, listen to traffic, and even have conversations without any interruptions, like taking out their earphones.
The difference is that adaptive transparency feeds the external sound through a processing chip first. This chip analyzes the sound, tries to identify what type of sound it is, and processes it before playing it back to the user. All of this is handled by machine learning algorithms.
The result is that the earphones will let you hear your environment with some tweaks. For example, overly loud noises will be reduced in volume before they reach your ears. More toned-down sounds that are still important, like voices, may be amplified a bit to help you hear conversations better. All while most of the unimportant background noise will still be filtered out.
It’s an awe-inspiring technology. When implemented correctly, adaptive transparency can help you hear when people are talking to you, pick up traffic, and even identify distinctive sounds like sirens passing nearby. All of these factors will be there. But instead of the sirens being deafening or the voices of people talking to you being too soft, it will all be evenly matched for you to hear.
Differences Between Adaptive Transparency And Transparency Mode
There are numerous differences between the two forms of audio transparency. The most significant ones are:
- How they process sound. Transparency mode does not process sound at all. What the microphones pick up outside the earphones, they play back as-is, and there is no difference at all. Adaptive transparency pushes the sound through a processor chip, where machine learning algorithms filter the sounds and adjust volume levels according to importance.
- The level of transparency. In most cases, users can adjust their level of transparency in transparency mode, letting them set the volume they want the ambient noise to be. Adaptive transparency does this automatically, taking some control away from the user but making it unnecessary for them to waste time trying to find the perfect setting.
- Adaptive transparency does not depend on noise canceling. Transparency mode is usually tied closely with noise cancelation and only works when enabled by that feature. Adaptive transparency also works well with noise cancelation, but it does not rely on it to work – you can have adaptive transparency active to control external volumes even without ANC.
- How you control the functions. You must manually enable Transparency mode, usually with a toggle in the earphones’ settings. Adaptive transparency is enabled and disabled automatically by the earphones depending on your environment and the noise level it detects.
- Their range of use cases. Transparency mode, which you must manually enable, won’t be ideal for all scenarios. If someone starts talking to you unexpectedly while you have switched transparency mode off, you must make another plan to hear them. Adaptive transparency removes that factor, making it useful in a broader range of scenarios.
- Range of support. Transparency mode is widely supported by nearly all headphone and earphone brands with active noise cancelation. Adaptive transparency isn’t as common yet, though the technology isn’t limited to only AirPods anymore. Bose, Sony, Jabra, and a few others all have their variations on adaptive transparency technology.
Which Transparency Option Is Better?
Only you can decide if transparency mode or adaptive transparency will be better for your purposes, but it helps to look at their different advantages and disadvantages:
- Transparency mode can offer you more immersion. If you’re listening to music while not in a public place and don’t have to hear your environment, the ability to turn transparency off is vital. Some earphones let you turn off adaptive transparency, but most have the function on by default.
- Adaptive transparency can make your life much easier and protect your hearing through its auto-adjustment feature. It can reduce the volume of ambient sounds that could be too loud, like sirens, without sacrificing the volume of people talking to you.
- Transparency mode is easier to find on a wide range of earphones, while adaptive transparency is still a bit of a niche technology.
- Earphones with standard transparency mode are generally cheaper than ones with adaptive transparency since the processor and algorithms cost more to manufacture and integrate into the earphones.
Conclusion
Transparency mode and adaptive transparency are both impressive technologies. Adaptive transparency is a significant leap forward from standard transparency mode since it can intelligently determine which sounds to amplify and which to reduce in volume. Still, it sacrifices some control in the process.
