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> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones.

This used to bug me a lot but I've found an easy solution. Just route the wire under your t-shirt or shirt or jacket. When I'm not using my headphones, the headphones hang around my neck. If I feel like taking off my headphones and placing them on the table, it takes 5 extra seconds to pull the wires from under my shirt after disconnecting them from the phone.

Do you have a length of slack cable dangling out the bottom of your shirt, like a performer wearing a lavalier mic? If not, then how do retrieve your phone from your pocket in order to change what you're listening to (or just to read something), without the cable yanking your own shirt up?

You put the slack in your pocket.

1/8" cabling could be wound into your pocket, yes—especially the thin-cored crap that most earbuds are made of. But at that point, are you gaining anything in audio quality by using wired headphones over Bluetooth headphones?

When I picture "preferring wired headphones", I picture taking around my studio monitors with their 10ft 1/4" solid-copper-cored cabling. (I did used to do pretty much this, when I was a stupid teenager! But that was before Bluetooth was invented.) That kind of cabling doesn't have a minimum curve radius that would let it fit in most pockets, unless you're either wearing an overcoat, or you've got the middle of the cable cleanly wrapped and tied in a linear bundle [which would still protrude upward out of most pockets, like a very tall phone.]

There's also the as-yet-unmentioned inconvenience of such cables—that they tend to have 1/4" RCA jacks on the ends, making plugging them into your phone a worrying experience involving adapters and shear stress—but oddly enough, modern phones with their lack of headphone jacks are better for this, since the flexible DAC adapters that plug into their USB ports protect the phone itself from being damaged by the shear force of a rigid 1/4"-to-1/8" adapter.

are you gaining anything in audio quality

What makes you think you’re gaining anything in audio quality by using 1/4” instead of 1/8” cable?

Just like the other commenter has mentioned, keep the slack on your pocket. Works best if your pocket is either deep or comes with zippers to seal them. Alternately, just wrap your phone with slack cable and be mindful about this when taking out your phone.

Get some decent headphones with in line controls on the cord or earcups, then you will not need to take the phone out of your pocket as often.

I have those. What I need to do that requires pulling out my phone, is selecting what I'll listen to next.

When listening to music, I don't usually bother to "queue up" songs/entire albums in advance, or to make playlists, but rather I just have a library of individual tracks, and then, as I listen to a song, I'll have a whim for what song to listen to next. (I use music to inspire me while writing fiction, so a lot of this is about creating the right mental mood for a scene.)

If I'm not listening to music, I'm listening to podcasts, which are also often a "listen to one episode, then pull your phone back out to select the next one" sort of experience, as many of them like to do things like slip in repeats of old episodes, such that a linear listening order gives you things you wouldn't want.

I have a Marmot jacket (very lightweight, but essentially water- and wind-proof, so any insulating layer underneath will keep you warm while keeping the jacket itself lightweight enough to prevent overheating on warm-but-inclement days) that features a breast pocket that zips vertically and is large enough to hold my iPhone 13 Pro Max. It has a small hole on the inside surface of that pocket that allows you to route a wire inside the jacket and connect it to a device in the pocket. If you need to manipulate the sound device, unzip the pocket and pull it out, do what you need and put it back.

the shortcoming with that, at least in my experience is that you cannot just quickly pull out your phone and glance at something, unless you want to accidentally pull your headphones out of your ears when you raise the phone to your face and tug on the wire that's trapped under your shirt.

With this setup you have to be a bit mindful for sure but if your cable is long enough, pulling out phone and using it as you would normally is no issue. You also keep slack cable on your pocket as other commenter has mentioned.

i've destroyed so many wired headphones by forgetting i'm wearing them and trying to take off my bag and tearing them out of my ears forcefully. it got to the point where i ended up using wired headphones like a consumable. switching over to wireless has been bliss just for this simple reason.

my biggest gripe with wireless so far, and this might be specific to galaxy buds+ is that their batteries suck after a years use. otherwise, all the things you describe are why they're great.

Do you exclusively use a messenger bag/shoulder bag? I've never had a problem with a backpack and wired headphones.

There's an auxiliary benefit as well in that a backpack seems to be way better for my back than a shoulder bag.

A downside being that backpacks (outside of hiking context) are so visually associated with schoolchildren that wearing them as a professional is kind of impossible, image-wise. For someone fresh out of college maybe; for thirty+ it starts communicating a very juvenile appearance. The key with messenger and shoulder bag ergonomics is all in positioning (vertically and in orientation relative to body).

How juvenile do you have to be to give a fuck about what people think of you wearing a backpack

Or to give more than a second's through to someone wearing a backpack, beyond "oh hey they have a backpack".

For one, if you're carrying enough crap isn't a backpack more ergonomic (assuming you wear both straps and aren't one-strapping it like the cool guy you are)

Image is one of those laws of society that we all wish wasn't true, all believe shouldn't be true, but is intractable and almost certainly derived from evolutionary pressure.

"Vestis virum facit", or clothes make the man is extraordinarily powerful in business and social dealings. Clothes signal a lot of information quickly. So this isn't about you caring what other people think, it's about how what other people care about affect your options. I could prescribe a few experiments to witness the differences directly but I'll tell you from personal experience that the A-B differences are stark.

There was a time when I was younger that I raged against this rule, but it's a youthful variation of "old man yells at cloud". You can try and create a new reality in your head and believe it fervently, and cut your nose to spite your face, but image matters greatly to other people, at a deep level.

Those kinds of things matter when it's all about appearance and there's nothing of importance being done.

If I need a job done, I couldn't care less if the person who is able to do it wears a backpack or not.

I could give less of a shit if someone wants to judge me by whether or not I wear a backpack.

FWIW I think messenger bags are shitty design and think people who use them just don't know any better.

No, silly. You just get a nicer backpack that is made of leather or something instead of nylon.

I once saw a person walk away from a mixing desk in a studio wearing headphones. He got janked back violently enough that he lost his balance and fell. Pretty good cable!

I'd say pretty good jack to not allow the cable to pull out. Should have been using a magsafe jack!

I can't count the number of times I have done this very thing.

I would kill for mag-safe everything jacks.

if it's safe enough to run power to a computer, it would easily be able to handle the electrical requirments for any other connector, right? you just need an adapter.

luckily, apple has you covered. you just need $19.99. /s

that would be a weird idea though. 1/4 TRS female -> magsafe-male magsafe-female -> 1/4 TRS male. i'm guessing it would look like a sort of inline coupler or similar in final design. essentially, it should be totally doable. i look forward to your pitch on Shark Tank, er, to YC, yeah, that's what I meant.

I recently bought a foundue set; the hotplate it comes with has a magsafe regular 110VAC wall cord (no DC adaptation) that's magsafe on the device end. I wondered why I had never seen one of these before. Then I realized that that flat device end is actually incredibly dangerous to the touch when plugged into the wall. It's just slightly less dangerous than potentially knocking over a pot of boiling cheese. For regular appliances that aren't going to give you third-degree burns, it'd probably be preferable to just let the device get yanked off the table, than to risk exposure to live current.

I wonder if, in the future, we could have household wall sockets and extension cords with "sense pins" ala USB PD; where the mains-voltage live "rail" isn't energized unless a device hops on the logic-level control rail and negotiates for it. Then we could truly live in a MagSafe-everything world. (Then again, to block that kind of current, they'd probably need to use relays and other non-solid-state parts, so they might not be the most durable things...)

This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.

Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting? Seems like it would never be U/L certified without some safety.

> This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.

Yes and no. MagSafe is safe because of the sense current and the handshake; but it's able to do that because it's just not driving very much wattage through the cable; it's low enough that it can direct the power with a simple transistor.

To make mains-voltage AC cords do that, you need a lot more than a transistor. A 1500W current (from e.g. a microwave, or a kettle) can arc a gap much wider than most transistors are printed at. Which is why, in even the most modern smart-home remote light-switch doodads, mains-voltage gets toggled using relays, rather than anything solid-state.

It's lovely to say "just do what MagSafe does", but with electricity, "quantity has a quality all its own" — i.e. very different engineering challenges to overcome.

> Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting?

It has recessed pins (pads, actually), but only barely (by about 5mm); basically to the point that a round metal table leg could make contact with the live pad within the recess.

And, as far as I can tell, there's no sense logic in the cable, either. No click of a relay coming from the cable when it gets connected; and no place for a transformer to live (not that it needs one—it's a hotplate, i.e. a big thick piece of iron you run mains-voltage AC current through.)

There is a relay inside the hotplate itself, which roughly acts as a thermostat (rather than a rheostat) to toggle the coil on and off to keep the cheese at temperature. You can hear it ticking on and off, and an indicator light goes on and off along with it.

But for that logic to work, the cable has to be drawing power to power it. So, AFIACT, the cable itself is always live.

Mixing desk outputs are typically either on the very front of the desk or at the back for a less ergonomically designed deck and at right angles to the plane of the deck for top mounted and sticking out the font for front mounted. So which ever you've got you'll never be doing a nice straight pull. Magsafe would be a nice solution to this (but back then nobody thought of this).

The mixing consoles I've used had the 1/4" coming vertically out of the top of the board. For other equipment, it might be coming out facing the user in a vertical rack piece of gear. Never have I seen it on the very front of the desk. that would be very prone to getting sheered off when a rolling chair slides across the front of the desk.

It boggles me how angry I get when that happens to me with earbuds. It's so jarring. You feel like u been attacked by the earbuds.

>Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones.

This is really easy with a backpack, I assume it's only a problem with a messenger bag (which is probably a bigger problem for one's back, unless the load is kept very light.)

i too, used to shun bluetooth headphones. But since i've started using it, i've come around - the interference drops and the battery, both aren't enough to overcome the increase in convenience and portability. It's really, really good to have that portability with headphones.

1. Stopping the music because its disconnected is literally non functional, its cool you can change your shirt without having to take out your head phones for 5 seconds but I just want mine to work while im going for a walk.

2. I have big hands buttons on the ear pod just knock it out of my ear.

3. I can take my bag off my sholder without taking out my wired headphones.

When I try to take my shirt off with wireless headphones they just get knocked out of my ear and im on the locker room floor looking for them.

Bluetooth doesn't have the range to do this without dropping in and out, at least in my house.

The big takeaway is that even the best wireless headphones on the market are less reliable than the cheapest wired.

> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones.

Well what I used to do when I had wired headphones was run the headphone cable under the bag so to speak. As in put on my headphones and then put on my bag. You just need to make sure you have enough slack in the headphones above the bag strap, which... I dunno I never found difficult. I just habitually put on my bag second, or would place my ear buds in my shirt/cups around my neck at least before putting on the bag.

Don't get me wrong it's nice for that to not matter with wireless, it's just the way you've phrased this implies to me putting the headphones on first and bag on second so the bag strap sits on top of the headphone cable never occurred to you and honestly that is confusing me

There is a happy medium.

Wireless headphones with a short wire hanging down to use as an antenna. Now send audio using 900MHz analog FM radio.

The signal quality can be made quite high by using enough power and/or bandwidth spreading.

Delay is near zero and it reconnects faster than you can blink at it.

Sure, they already make those ("radio" headphones); they sell them in pairs with 900MHz transmitters, for — among other things — people who are hard-of-hearing to better hear their (old, non-Bluetooth-enabled) TVs.

But I'm pretty sure what you're really trying to mentally re-engineer here is one of these: https://en-ca.sennheiser.com/stage-monitoring-headphones-hea...

Ever wondered what's in the rack on rear center stage of a concert? One of these, so the performers can all hear the mix over their own instrument/the crowd without tripping all over cables.

(More recently, they're two-way, meaning that the e.g. electric guitar you hear is passing through a chain of: headphone pre-amp, wireless transmitter, wireless receiver, mixing board, amp. Effects pedals? These days, they're wireless MIDI controllers that signal to a DAW plugged into the mixing board!)

> Wi-fi "randomly" disconnects for a few seconds due to interference just as often, but you don't notice

That’s false. If it happens to you, get better wireless equipment.

I say "disconnect" but I don't mean that the 802.11 PHY driver of the computer or the base station notices that there's a disconnection. Just that there's a time-correlated burst of packet loss on some/all channels.

This might not ever happen to you if you live in a bunker, or on a farmstead at least 500 feet from any neighbours. (Though I wouldn't completely discount the possibility; there's always solar storms.)

But if you live in a city, and like to sit near large picture windows (where the light from the window cuts across the straight-line path between your wireless devices and their base station), then every once in a while you're going to get what's basically a mini-EMP blast blowing through your window glass, on one random unlicensed-spectrum-interfering frequency on another: every time someone in the building across from yours vacuums with a 1950s vacuum cleaner with an ungrounded plug, or uses their shitty $50 freestanding microwave with underspecced side shielding; or operates their unlicensed AliExpress garage-door opener, or... etc.

If we could hear 2.4/5GHz, every day in a city would sound like Diwali: sudden short explosions, from every direction, at any odd hour of the day.

Remember, "unlicensed" spectrum means the FCC isn't policing those bands like they do with licensed allocations; so all the 2.4/5GHz "polluters" — the device buyers, and the manufacturers — never get told to stop.

A burst of packet loss that doesn’t translate into at least a disconnection of current TCP streams is, by definition, not a disconnection.

There are plenty of connection-oriented protocols other than TCP that do experience a disconnect during these packet-loss bursts. RTP, for example.

There's a reason IP softphones are always wired, rather than being wi-fi devices — speaking RTP, they can't tolerate the somewhat-normal condition of RF-interference-induced 802.11-PHY packet-loss bursts nearly as well as devices speaking TCP can. They end up dropping calls in about the same way that Bluetooth Audio drops pairing.

(This is also most of why 802.11e QoS Traffic Categories exist — RTP is essentially hard-realtime, so even temporarily queuing RTP packets due to competing high-throughput TCP flows, could be enough to "choke out" the RTP flow.)

That seems a problem with RTP more than with wireless connections.

No, it's an inherent problem whenever a packet-switched, multi-user, shared channel inherently built around queued transmission tries to emulate real-time protocols, the earliest of which is "a directly-connected wire."

This sort of substitution can work, but it requires very stable, low-noise links (that is, with little to no burst noise) and the cooperation of devices and network equipment.

...Okay, how would you suggest a better protocol avoid that problem? For voice/video calls, you need a fairly small buffer size so that latency isn’t distracting. But if you have a (say) 250ms buffer, and the wireless connection drops out for 500ms, then there’s no way to avoid losing some packets.

TCP’s reliability comes at the cost of increased, inconsistent, and unpredictable latency; which is fine for downloading a file, browsing the web, or streaming video with a 30-second buffer; but unacceptable for a real-time call.

And hope your neighbours don't think the same and get better wireless equipment.