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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

They sell them without wires

Yes, of course. I'm still amazed on some level that the wired versions are considered acceptable, because the thumping is so prominent — as far as I'm concerned, it's a fatally flawed design. But that's the human perceptual mechanism for you — highly optimized for filtering out unwanted sensory input.

I have a bunch of cheap in-ears (each comes with a bag of different seals) and none of them have the issue you describe. Sure, you can hear it when the cables bump against something, but it's not a "massive bass thump".

Stick your forefinger in your ear, well enough to form a bit of a seal. Then move your finger around a little bit. That causes a ton of rumbling/thumping noise as the air in the ear canal moves much more dramatically than it does when encountering sound waves in open air.

The same effect happens when you jostle a sealed in-ear monitor. I don't doubt that you are not perceiving this rumble, but my explanation is that your brain is filtering it out.

EDIT: It occurs to me now that if you listen at consistently high volume (which many in-ear headphone users do), jostling rumble will be relatively lower.

I don't listen at high volume and my hearing is quite excellent. I'm guessing that there's something about your ear canal that causes a really good seal (maybe wet ears), or maybe something about my ear canal that I don't get these perfect air-tight bass-thumping seals. FWIW I don't force in-ears deeply into my ear canal, because that's uncomfortable as heck (and tends to make the bass way to boomy and overpronounced in my experience). I only stick the soft rubber part in.

The situation seems a bit more complicated now given that only wired headphones can support the best lossless codecs, as I understand it. I wouldn't currently by anything that couldn't plug in with a wire, at least optionally.

Microphonics can be just as much of an issue with wireless headphones.

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