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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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..).

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.

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