I had this thought just now at the gym. I noticed multiple people, myself included, using wireless earbuds during our workouts – specifically AirPods.
My question is, if multiple people are using AirPods that work on the same frequency/signal, how come our music doesn’t all interfere with each other? How do each of our phones/AirPods differentiate from the others a few feet away from me?
In: Engineering
While one part of the story is that all devices don’t work at same frequency, the bigger part is that these devices transmit sounds encoded as data. Sending a seconds worth of audio data can be done much, much faster than in a second, leaving time to send other audio data to other devices.
The data transmission isn’t continuous, it’s in packets of short audio recordings. As long as you get your next packet before the last one finishes playing, you’ll never notice.
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