What Does All This Noises From Your AirPods and Beats Really Mean?
When you pick up your AirPods or Beats, you expect them to play your favorite music, podcasts, movies, and more. What you don’t expect to hear are random, unexplained alerts. These sounds can be distracting and confusing, and can also affect the performance of your headphones and earbuds. Here’s what all these tones mean and why they don’t sound.
AirPods and Beats compared to the rest
The reason we are focusing on AirPods and Beats headphones and earbuds is because Apple manufactures both brands of audio devices. This fact is pretty obvious when it comes to AirPods, but if you don’t keep an eye on technology acquisitions, you might not know that headphone maker Dr. Dre is under the same umbrella as your iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
As such, Apple uses unique alerts to convey the same messages between these two types of earbuds. Although the sounds themselves are not identical, both AirPods and Beats have the same warnings. (This is not necessarily unique to these headphones; other Bluetooth devices also have their own alert tones, but it’s up to you to decode them.)
However, in this article, we delve deeper into the different tones of Apple brands. I have recorded as best I can the types of sounds you hear; bold text indicates where tone matters most. You can hear all the sounds of AirPods in the following video:
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent video for Beats; I have a pair of PowerBeats 3 and Beats Studio Buds that I have tested and my results are shown below. While these two devices should cover many different types of Beats sounds, it is possible that other pairs of Beats have unique sounds as well.
Connecting to a new device
The following sounds indicate that your AirPods or Beats are connected to a new device. You usually hear this when you turn on the headphones or plug in the headphones if there is a device nearby that will automatically connect you. You will also hear these sounds when manually connecting to another device.
AirPods: Yes, yes.
Beats (over): Yes – yes – yes – yes – yes – yes – yes .
Beats (newer): Yes, yes.
Disconnecting from your device
When your AirPods or Beats disconnect from your current device, they play the following sounds.
AirPods: Wow .
Beat (over): Yes -yes-yes-yes-yes- yes .
Blows (newer): Yes -yes-yes-yes-yes.
Note that one of these sounds will play when you manually unplug your headphones or earbuds, but if you hear it unexpectedly, then your AirPods or Beats have turned off for some reason. If your headphones have a power button, you may have turned them off by mistake. The device you are connected to may have loaded your connection for some reason; it is also possible that your headphones have shut off due to low battery (but this usually causes a different sound). Just know, if you hear this sound, please note that your sound will most likely start playing through your device’s built-in speakers, not your AirPods or Beats.
Low battery warning
This sound is widely recognized among AirPods users. A terrifying tone signals the imminent death of the headphones with the threat of a quiet and joyless drive to work. Luckily for us, this means more than that; when you hear this for the first time, it means that there is 20% charge left in your headphones.
AirPods: Doo -doo-doo-doo.
Beats (older): Will update this section as soon as we test and record sound.
Beats (newer): Will update this section as soon as we test and record sound.
About closing
This is the same sound as the low battery warning. If you hear this a second time, yes, your headphones are about to die (sorry).
AirPods: Doo -doo-doo-doo.
Beats (older): Will update this section as soon as we test and record sound.
Beats (newer): Will update this section as soon as we test and record sound.
Noise control
Noise Canceling is a feature unique to certain AirPods and Beats. Thus, you may not have to deal with these tones in your specific headphones or earbuds. However, if you have noise canceling capability, you will hear these tones.
Apple has a unique tone for activating noise cancellation, transparency mode (which pumps in sound externally so you can better understand your surroundings) and when noise cancellation is turned off. You can switch these modes from in-ear or earbud headphones, so if you hear these tones and feel an accidental change, you are likely to accidentally press a button on the device itself:
Noise suppression
AirPods: Doo (above).
Rhythm: Doo – doo – doo (from low to high).
Transparency
AirPods: Doo-doo .
Rhythm: Doo – doo – doo (descending).
Off
AirPods: Doo (bottom tone).
Rhythm: Du .