There are threads on Reddit about degraded noise cancel performance on the AirPod Pros over time but most of them are full of crap. You likely just need to clean them. The problem manifests as, you put them in and cannot really tell if noise cancel is working or not. Or you seemingly cannot turn the noise cancel off despite it saying off. Maybe the bass blows too. At first you might think, oh they are in that crappy Adaptive mode that does nothing but make everything bad, and then after rotating the modes, zero change from any of the three.
All of these photos are from after I did this and proved it still worked so no we're not going to post a picture of crusty headphones encased in ear amber.
- Blue Tack
- Cotton swab things to clean your ears. And another to clean the Airpods.
- Super high percentage isopropyl rubbing alky.
- Patience
First pop off the ear nips off. This is super difficult to do when they are new. I tend to wrap my fingers in my shirt to get a good grip on the base where it clicks to the airpod. Then just pull way harder than you want to. Give the rubbers a good scrub. Mine tend to tint yellow if I don't give them a good clean every two weeks. Be careful with the screen molded into the bottom of them, it job is to protect the actual speaker screen on the AirPod and it looks very delicate. To clean out some debris I used a can of compressed air to blow through them backwards - but not at full blast. Just slowly increasing the air speed until I saw the gunk blow out. Once these rubber things are clean you are done with them set them aside. No idea if it matters but I make sure to track left/right.


Soak a cotton swab in the alcohol, flick all the huge drops off, and then very lightly rub the 3 meshes of the airpod. Don't press hard against them you are not looking to squirt rubbing alcohol into them. Just lightly wiping them off. Also wipe down the metal contacts that charge them while you are at it. The little metal silver things on the tip of the stem. And I mean since you are here shove them into the charging case as well to clean out the stem slot. These screens are hiding microphones for the noise cancelling and transparency modes, as well as just the pressure venting so if they are dirty you get no sound in or vibrations out. The mesh is very fine to try and be water resistant, so when it gets packed you get stuck in a muffled degraded AirPod world. Notice in these photos mine are still kinda have some stuffs in the black grills. I did just barely a good enough job to make them work again.


Then it is time for the blue tack. There is a very important thing to know when handling this stuff - don't. You want it to be cold. When you pick it up with your hands it will warm up and get softer. You do not want it soft, you want it hard, because the trick is to lightly press them against the 3 screens to squish the blue tack in BUT NOT REALLY. You're really just wanting it to squish just enough to lightly tap whatever dust or debris is in the screen and then pull it out. This is also why you don't want the blue tack warmed up by your hand, this will make it softer and more stringy. Then you get blue tack stuck in the screens and are worse off until you can get blue tack to get the blue tack out. It sucks. Clean a screen, set the blue tack down and admire the handy work while it cools down again.
At this point they should be pretty well clean so snap the nips back on and when putting them in your ears hopefully it become instantly noticeable that the noise canceling is working as expected again. I have personally performed this ritual on the Airpods Not Pro many times to restore bass quality, and twice on the Airpods Pro to restore noise cancel quality.