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Comment by jp555 | Hacker News Reader

Um, how many lifetimes have audiophile headphones been available?

If there have been people passing headphones down to their kids, I bet that would be a lot smaller group than you are suggesting. A pastoral fantasy.

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My Sony MDR-V6s were purchased by a relative in the 1980s for use with a vinyl deck and are connected to a Mac today, having worked with cassettes, minidiscs, CDs and iPods along the way. With nothing more than replacement earpads they still sound great.

Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.

The real question needs to be how long good wireless headphones have ever lasted.

Airpods Max don't compete with any of these "um, see?" headphones people are listing. Very few people these days are settling for wired headphones. I know I got the hell out of that tech as soon as I could.

The solution is to sell the transmitter and/or battery separately, with the earphones using a standardized connector, such as MMCX.

Earphones stay, receiver may get replaced.

That sounds clunky

"...so let's burn some more of the world."

I would understand the sentiment if there weren't significantly bigger fish to fry. Disposable electronics make up an infinitesimal percentage of non-biodegradable waste that leaves my house. Maybe we should first tackle the literal pounds of plastic waste from food packaging the average person tosses every week before we start shaming people for buying a < 1oz pair of earbuds that only last a couple years.

The question is: which is worse for the environment? A leaking battery or plastic?

Genuine question. Are there any studies on this? And I’m asking about any kind of battery. People toss out used AA and AAAs all the time.

Most environmentalists are in it for the religion.

For example, wind turbine blades are composite components that are too expensive to recycle and wear our much faster than most people realize, so there are vast garbage dumps filled with buried giant wind turbine blades made of petrochemicals.

Most electric vehicles are charged with electricity made from burning carbon (coal & natural gas).

Reusable plastic bags need to be used like 28 times before they have less of an impact than disposable ones. Cotton bags need to be used over 7000 times before they are better than disposable.

For some applications, people don't settle for wireless either. Probably mostly for latency or battery issues. I use wireless for listening to podcasts, and wired for playing (performing not recorded) music.

Wireless has theoretical advantages for all kinds of playback if you don't care about latency.

- independent of quality of your player's DAC

- amp is designed to match the headphone

- sound can't be transmitted through the cable (microphonic effects, etc)

- you can walk around without keeping the player in your pocket

It'd help if the audio codecs used were lossless of course.

A big con of course is you now have another device to routinely charge and a battery to replace.

My MDR-7506, a close relative to the V6, didn't last ten years before the high tones got so harsh they hurt to listen to. Never did open them up to see if a cone failed or something, but did listen to them about ten hours a day.

I have MDR-V6s too from long ago. Love those (even the springy cord). I've had to replace the ear pads, which fall apart after 8 years or so, but other than that no problems, they sound fantastic.

(I noticed their pro "cousin" headphones on the heads of many recording engineers so perhaps one of the reasons they sound great is the mix might have been made on them..).

Um, since at least 1970 with arrival of the Koss 4As.[1] And these were followed up by similar classics such as the AKG K240s from the early 1980s as well as the Grado SR80Es or Sony MDR7506s from the early 90s.[2][3][4]. However there are many more.

There is quite an active market for these and they are highly sought after because of their audiophile and build quality. Anyone who was fortunate enough to have inherited them likely for those reasons.

[1] https://www.koss.com/history

[2] https://overearmania.com/2019/01/19/akg-k240-monitor/

[3] https://www.headfonia.com/grado-sr80e-evolution/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_MDR-V6

Given their construction, anyone claiming to have set of plastic-fantastic Grados (SR60, SR80) they have actually used since that period and that never needed a repair or replacement of significant portions of the phone would be straining credulity - they have similar issues as Apple cables where insufficient or completely lacking strain relief eventually causes the non-removable cable to break, requiring rewiring - and that is if the pins holding the headphone to headband don't break first. Higher models fix the latter problem, but not the former one.

In that way they are great comparison with AirPods Max as in practice they will end up in a landfill rather than being lovingly handed down...

My dad had a pair of Sennheisers he'd bought when he was younger, and I used those as a kid likely 30 years later.

https://www.cnet.com/news/does-sennheisers-iconic-1968-headp...

Yup, my HD600 are 20 years old too :)

That just makes me feel much older :)

My parents passed their sennheisers down to me, and my mother got hers originally from her mother.

So that’s 3 generations of sennheisers. Some of those now being decades old, with only cables and leather pads being replaced every 5-10 years.

Another thing here is -- I'm not sure how many people here have had to sort through their parents' and older relatives' stuff after they're gone, but I'm sure it's more than a few.

How many kids will want Dad's headphones from the 70s? Probably a few, but I would wager that for a lot of us, sifting through our parents' old hardware probably means a lot of figuring out what has sentimental value, what has actual use (e.g. even if I wanted to keep my folks' nice old record player, none of my music is on records and I'm not about to start buying physical media just because the player's there), and what's headed off to Goodwill.

It's nice to imagine a world where your re-padded headphones are still in use in 2070 when you're long in the cold ground, but that seems like a nostalgic fantasy more than reality for the vast majority of people and hardware.

I think there's a big difference in items that are nice/durable/long-lived enough that you'll donate them to Goodwill and they can be loved and used by someone else for years more... compared to that pair of bluetooth headphones your kids will find in the closet of a member of our generation when they pass away in 50 years, that are immediately tossed out into the trash because they don't turn on and they're impossible to fix.

>Um, how many lifetimes have audiophile headphones been available?

Isn't it more of a question of how many lifetimes does it take for a pair of AirPods and their battery case to return to the dirt?

The Stax SR-1 was released in 1960. They are still amazing. I inherited a SR-Lambda (made since 1979) from by dad.

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