Yeah, they use their own proprietary protocol over Bluetooth Low Energy (which you can basically use as a raw packet transport).
For some reason the Bluetooth consortium was years behind the ball in standardizing a high quality bidirectional audio transport, versus the phone-quality "Hands Free Profile" and "Headset" Profile using 90s era codecs (uni-directional is fine since it uses a higher quality "Advanced Audio Distribution" profile).
The consortium launched Bluetooth Low Energy audio last year (or maybe this year?), but I'm not sure if it's actually shipping in anything yet.
Yeah, whenever I use Bluetooth headphones that have a microphone with my PC I have to be sure to disable all of the headset profiles so it doesn't switch to dial-up quality as soon as an app requests microphone access.
I'm skeptical if the protocol makes that much difference, the experience with Beats X basically felt the same as any normal BT headphones, AirPods definitely felt less fussy and more seamless despite them both using the same W1 chip.
My theory is the AirPods start getting ready for syncing as soon as you open the case/detects you touching them, while the Beats X had a traditional on button and were entirely unimpressive to me.
I was referring more to audio quality. Airpods seems to be able to act in headset mode (audio + microphone) without killing the quality of the audio you are listening to. Most headphones switch to a very low bitrate mode when you activate the microphone.
