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Comment by enjoiful | Hacker News Reader

Honestly until you try wireless, you won't understand just how much better the user experience is to not have a wire.

Honestly until you have to suffer battery problems, you won't understand just how much better the user experience is to have a wire.

;)

I was on this boat too until the Airpods pro. I'm much happier without the wire in virtually all cases, despite occasional bluetooth hiccups

The only thing that bothers me with my various Airs-pod is that they sometimes want to connect to other devices (or, more accurately, other devices want to connect to them)..for example I'll be on a call with my Airpods Max connected to my phone, and I'll lean a little too close to my desk and this little dialog pops up on my iPad wanting to connect to them...or I'll move my phone a little bit and a little dialog pops up asking if it should connect to my home pod...but it's a very minor annoyance that is almost comical now.

>Bluetooth hiccups.

I have AirPods Pro and I’m impressed with how amazing they are (I have a pair of LCD-X, I’m particular about audio equipment). One funny side efffect of using 2.4GHz Bluetooth is when I use the old microwave at work it makes my connection choppy and unusable. Quite funny figuring that out until it occurred to me ;)

Having no battery on your headphone when you want to use it right now is extremely frustrating indeed.

However headphones with 50+ hours of playing time actually exist nowadays. And this makes life so much easier. Besides that I bought one of those charging cables where the tip is detachable[0] and use that to charge my headphone.

Even on linux things mostly works! Just remember to restart your machine after every system update and don't move your headset between devices. I only use linux so I don't know how true is that statement for other environments.

If you really need to use the same headphone for multiple devices you should look for a wired solution.

All in all I don't think wireless headphones have a worse user experience, it is just a tradeoff. And to be clear, both my headphones and my smartphone have a p2 jack. This is what I call having a cake and eating it too.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Terasako-Magnetic-Charging-Cable-5-Pa...

I finally settled on the HyperX Cloud Flight S.

They have wireless charging, so whenever I put them down on my desk they are charging. I have a separate high quality mic on my desk so I don't have a dangly thing in my face.

I only use the headphones in the study or wandering around the house so it's the perfect solution for me. (I did need to tweak PulseAudio to lower the latency).

Been trying for years - both. Still do. Not on a single day I’ll pick a wireless (read it Bluetooth, because that’s it is) over wired.

Sound is worse, reliability is worse, power consumption is worse (and phone’s becomes worse as well) - I know a certain kind of users/fans have ready answer for this “duh! use a pocket nuclear reactor”, cost is worse, repairability is worse, usually looks worse. There you go.

AirPods use Apple’s proprietary W1/H1 chip for pairing, and it seems to make BT more reliable somehow. The impact of BT on the phone’s battery life is negligible.

As for sound quality, the Pros or a Sony WF/MDR are quite good. If you’re noticing significant reduction in quality you’re either choosing low quality ones or something else in the audio chain is wrong.

I actually prefer the Sony to any of my wired headphones (AT, Roland, Etymotic, Philips SHP) most of the time. The noise canceling and ability to turn my head / move about more than offset any loss in quality - which I’m unlikely to notice while working anyway.

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