If you’re attending a loud concert, using earbuds in hear-through mode isn’t the safest choice. Although the AirPods Pro’s adaptive transparency mode should provide a reasonably safe listening experience in moderately loud environments (95 dBA or less, such as you’d experience using typical power tools), it doesn’t adequately reduce concert-level sound. So it does live up to Apple’s vague claims, but it doesn’t live up to the hopes that some concertgoers had. Our testing shows that the AirPods Pro’s noise-cancelling mode is a better option for hearing protection at concerts, but for us it reduced the sound level so much that we lost most of the visceral kick that makes concerts so much fun to attend.