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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

>It isn’t a forward-thinking move like Apple’s decision to kill off the floppy disk, because no one’s playing along.

In an article about how too many phone manufacturers are removing the headphone jack? A lot of people are playing along. The market for bluetooth headphones has blown up, covering a range of prices and form factors - it's absurd and perhaps wishful thinking to say this isn't a real trend. I also don't believe there are no benefits to the manufacturing process.

I predict this article will feel very outdated in a couple years. I was very skeptical of the removal of the headphone jack, but six months ago I tried out a bluetooth headset, and I would never go back. It's easier and doesn't snag, and is easier to put away. This isn't to say everyone should get rid of the headphone jack, but I don't see why manufacturers shouldn't be able to.

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Here's my problem with bluetooth:

Sound quality.

Bluetooth is not able to offer the fidelity of a standard 3.5mm jack. Until it is capable of doing so, I will not even consider using bluetooth headphones.

Plus, industry standard high-fidelity and studio quality headphones don't come with bluetooth due to the fidelity issue. I already have a several hundred dollar pair of awesome headphones. Why would I purchase a phone that I can't connect them to?

Let's call the removal of the headphone jack what it is: a cash grab. The only reason manufacturers are doing this is to increase profits. By removing the 3.5mm jack companies no longer have to pay for the part or attaching the part to the board. On top of this, manufacturers can now charge for special dongles and proprietary wireless headphones.

Some devices can send AAC at up to 96KHz over Bluetooth, and its compression is considered transparent by the ITU at 128kbit/s.

I think the manufacturers didn't want to add cruft to their headphones, as the batteries and decoding circuitry would probably begin to crowd out the actual sound reproduction hardware.

Of all the complaints I've heard (and agreed with) on removing the 3.5mm jack, inability to send high-fidelity audio over BT is the one I think I disagree with the most.

(I agree with the rest of your comment, though.)

I don't know... quality is one of my primary concerns too.

To be clear, I'm not someone who romanticizes audio quality. I'm really about hard facts. But bluetooth audio quality is a known issue, and although there have been attempts to address it, it seems like nothing is really quite there yet.

Yes, there are higher-quality audio bluetooth standards, but not everything works with them, and there's interference, and general glitchiness, etc. Bluetooth audio quality is one of these things where there's a huge difference between what's on paper and what reality is.

To be fair, I think there's issues with wireless and wifi audio in general (not necessarily with quality, but the whole package: quality, reliability, open standardization, adoption, etc.). I also think bluetooth audio is fine for some basic level of audio quality.

But bluetooth audio as a general standard is just not up to snuff. It's certainly not comparable to other AV jack/port/interface standards, like 3.5mm jacks or HDMI or whatever.

I definitely do not consider myself an audiophile, but I can only listen through bluetooth audio for so long before it drives me crazy. The closest thing I can think of is mono AM radio or something.

This was a random page about bluetooth audio--I just picked it because it was the near the top of a Google search. It sums up the situation with bluetooth well, though, and being random from my perspective kinda underscores it's not a niche perspective:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-to-know-about-bluetooth-313459...

Personally, I'm pissed about getting rid of headphone jacks, and for the general trend of manufacturers to think eliminating things in the name of minimalism is a good idea. It's ok to a point, but 3.5 mm elimination is past that point IMHO.

I fully suspect someday 3.5mm jacks will be outdated, but we're not there yet.

"Interference" and "glitchiness" are kind of hand-wavy, and so is the "known issue" of BT audio quality. If you could link some "hard facts" about those, I'd love to read on.

Yes, you can experience wireless issues with poorly designed devices. But I know people that use BT audio as their primary ways to listen to music, and I'm personally building such a device for my car. I can send audio to it from further than I am willing to test, and I haven't yet had my audio interrupted.

As far as I can tell, as long as you're making sure you're using the highest quality standard possible, you'll receive a decent experience.

Where the experience breaks down, as I mentioned earlier, is the lack of high-fidelity sound reproduction options due to the size of the decoding circuitry and battery pack. BT audio headphones, though usable, are generally not great. If you have something externally powered (e.g. my car) it is fine... but that use case occurs less often.

Perhaps your devices only support the SBC codec, mandatory for inclusion in the standard. Or perhaps your devices have chosen to communicate over the hands-free profile instead of A2DP, which is another issue I've had.

I don't claim that 3.5mm jacks will be outdated, and I certainly don't think so either. I just think that BT audio is "good enough" strictly in terms of fidelity, and that other factors confound its inclusion in high-fidelity headphones.

For bidirectional audio, 64kbit/s is not good enough.

On sound quality, the current bluetooth headsets are 2-3x priced over the same brand's top wired headphones, for fraction of the quality. Not just because the aptX HD is not “good enough”, but because the poor DACs. Good enough DACs are power-hungry bugs, it is unlikely to see them built into wireless headsets in 2-3 years time.

Fair enough in some respects, but the facts you're looking for are really about product quality ratings, which gets into a quagmire.

My point isn't that decent quality audio with BT isn't possible, it's that I don't think BT standards are at the same point as 3.5mm. As you yourself said, if you're saying that BT is fine "as long as you're making sure you're using the highest quality standard possible" then there's a problem.

It sounds like you've run into some of the same issues ("choosing to communicate over the hands-free profile"); I think my broader point is that with BT, it seems like there's a lot of those sorts of things.

Something like car audio or home stereo, with a nice, well-configured set up, is fine, but for a lot of things it doesn't have the same plug and play kind of simplicity of 3.5 mm.

Maybe we agree more than we disagree, although come to different opinions about jacks in phones. To me, BT is a promising thing that's not quite foolproof enough to compare to 3.5mm.

In general I feel like mobile device design has this tail-wagging-the-dog problem the last few years.

How much do I have to pay extra for the same audio quality (I'm using an ATH M50 I bought for 100 bucks) and how often do I have to recharge it? Are the batteries replaceable?

The cable problem almost went away when I switched to a coiled cable, I really would gain little to nothing with going wireless, specially when accounting for the extreme nuisance that is having to worry about the battery of yet another device.

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