fred8559 I have a whole bunch of devices for high quality audio. From a Hi-Res DAP to a AudioFly DragonQuest Cobalt USB DAC. In use with a B&W Px8 and AirPods Pro 2, and before the cable broke also AirPods Max. I tried the Buds 2 on a large library of different formats, from FLAC to AAC to MQA and on different devices. When comparing them to the best of what I have,, which has lossless audio at 24bit and 192kHz, I can only say that the sound of these Buds 2 is just solid, regardless of the pice. The noise cancellation is good enough for me, In just don’t like full cancellation unless it’s smart (not like Apple’s first try that I can use on the AirPods 2, that’s z fail but hey, at least a first attempt. Have. Been listening on my iPad the last few hours using Tidal on Max, sometimes with and sometimes without Dolby Atmos. And yes I fully understand that needing to send this audio over Bluetooth, it will get recompressed regardless of the settings in Tidal, meaning it will be using either AAC (preferred, better quality lossy) or SBC (fallback, standard quality lossy), depending on the hardware someone uses. But even when listening to the AAC or SBC compressed version, not the original 24-bit/192 kHz quality, my opinion is holding it’s ground: they surprised me in a positive way! And well, I don’t know where others live, but here in Amsterdam the 39 euro price level is similar as wat you pay for a large bottle of laundry detergent… It’s the first nothing or cmf piece of hardware I own, mainly out of of curiousity and because they cost ‘nothing’ :-). But it might well be that after the first hours of usage I am going to use these Buds 2 more than I had expected.
