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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Wired headphones. I’ve never had to start a meeting by trying to mess with my audio settings, or had to think about charging another battery.

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Wireless headphones. Because sometimes I really have to go and it's literally no problem to walk to the bathroom. Or to go make tea. Or to do whatever. Freedom to not be chained up is amazing. Try it.

I too don't feel like I've had to mess with audio settings. I have some SteelSeries Actis Pro's I bought a long time ago. They have bluetooth, but there's also a nice usb-based head-unit I use with higher quality, lower latency, and no pairing concerns. It shows present battery level quite clearly (which is highly enduring). The head unit also has a battery charger built in, and the headphones come with a secondary battery. I don't feel like I have to think about charging batteries either; if I have a slammed day of non-stop talking, it's easy to see at the end of the day I have half a battery left & I swap it (which takes <10s). People selling you Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about batteries seem misguided & silly to me. The freedom is amazing. Letting yourself get bothered & concerned enough to trap yourself into a narrow situation is dumb: be skeptical, at least.

Good to have both for different reasons.

A good wired headset can be superior to wireless mic audio when presenting or interacting.

If merely consuming, and hanging around wireless is good too.

I have some mid-grade Rode Wireless Go and nice >$100 Samsung lavaier mics I can use when needed, which is faultless, reliable, amazing prosumer gear no one could conceivably gripe about, but honestly the Actis Pro headset I have is probably a better choice for both cases.

The Actis has better microphone positioning by far, which counts for so much.

I'm interested to test the range versus the Rode, but given that I can be 3 floors away & the Actis still fine, I'd be surprised if the Rode really had shockingly better range/reliability/interference-resistance.

I continue to think there's a paranoia & level-of-concern that does not match what modern hardware can do.

> I continue to think there's a paranoia & level-of-concern that does not match what modern hardware can do.

I think this is related to the fact that most wireless headphones people have experience with are Bluetooth.

BT headphones have lag, and, when used in duplex mode, have terrible quality. And this lag adds to the one introduced by the conferencing software.

I've got myself a Jabra headset that communicates over DECT. This thing is spectacular. No discernible lag (as tested with games) and the mic quality is better than what I hear from people rocking Bose and Sony BT headphones. The range is great, too. Much better than what I get from my BT headphones.

Agreed! I also use DECT based headset (Poly i.e. ex-Plantronics - recently acquired by HP) and it is amazingly good. Range up to f*ckintillion meters (anywhere within the house or garden basically), up to 8 hours use on a single charge (I regularly forget to charge it overnight and I can still use it the next day), no delays, no weird disconnects in the middle of a call, great mic quality and it works both with my PC and home landline.

Wireless bluetooth headset mics can vary wildly (rtings.com has nice breakdowns).

I have tested a few and find the noise cancelling on the mic for the other party is awful if that's something you are looking for on far too many.

Both is the answer. I'm using wireless if I anticipate whether I'll need mobility sooner or later, and wired as backup and other cases.

It’s possible to combine both.

I have a Philips SHP-9000 headphone with a vmoda boom pro mic, which plugs into the 3.5mm jack on the headphones. On the other end, I sometimes attach a cheap Chinese Bluetooth receiver, which can be plugged into any 3.5mm jack, so any wired headphones can be made wireless as needed.

I got a Sony that is both wired and wireless, really nice!

I use wireless headphones because cords get in my way, but the “step away to make tea” seems like an unlikely use case to me. It isn’t as if you don’t have to see the screen anyway… more than half the time someone is sharing a window and saying things like, “what do we do about THIS?” while waving their pointer over something.

You underestimate how much time is commonly spent in meetings literally waiting for a moment you are interested in.

I often do not need to see their screen because I am a vestigial appendage to the meeting

This is where you grab the entire laptop and lie down in bed, only to wake up alone in the meeting an hour later.

In addition to the other replies, I've noticed that during meetings, my insatiable desire for coffee or tea rises about 10000%

I just need to be sipping something.

Your meetings must be much better than the average. It's been quite a while since I had meetings regularly, but I'd guess that on average I needed to see (or think about) maybe 20% of the meeting.

Wireless headphones with the option of plugging them in when the battery dies. Best of both worlds. I use an industrial pair with passive noise canceling since I work on a treadmill.

I’ll add moderately high quality mic to this. If you’re spending a lot of working hours on calls, putting the resources into providing clear, intelligible voice for the people you’re working with will definitely be appreciated.

I have a Plantronics (now Polycom, or Poly?) wired headset. Makes me look like a call center worker but the audio and mic are great quality. Sometimes I’m on a call and can’t hear someone well over the bad speakers I have in my monitor. The headset always clears it up.

> now Polycom, or Poly?

HP: https://press.hp.com/us/en/press-releases/2022/hp-inc-to-acq...

Like what?

For my personal setup: Rode NT-USB Mini (https://rode.com/en/microphones/usb/nt-usb-mini). It also give me a physical volume control for attached headphones.

I second that device, but it even though it says it has a directional cardioid polar pattern, it is fairly omnidirectional, only use it when you have little background noise next to you (other people, animals, etc).

I like V-Mode BoomPro which is boom mic that connects to any headphones.

Not GP but I love my WorkTunes. Excellent passive noise protection.

Sadly with today's auto-detecting OSes I've more than once found my audio output setting itself to speakers, or worse, to my monitor (which doesn't and has never had speakers, but that doesn't seem to matter).

I joined a meeting one day, couldn't hear anyone, turned the volume up before checking the output device (because I rarely ever change them) and ... it was connected to my kitchen Bluetooth. I had been blasting my wife with a meeting room full of people shouting "CAN YOU HEAR US NOW??"

This. Never had any issue with my wireless headphones, but Teams insists on picking random outputs and inputs even from one call to the next.

The only logic I've found is that it prefers devices that handle both input and output. So, it works OK with my combined headphones + mic, but if I want to use my external dedicated mic + headphones without mic, I have to fiddle with the settings whenever I join a new call.

Teams and Goole Meet have the worst UX for switching inputs and outputs. Dunno why they still insist on not doing in properly.

On Zoom changing either is literally a click away. AND you can test your mic while already on a call so you can listen while you fix your setup.

To me, Zoom's killer feature is that "use system settings" actually does what it says.

In Teams, I may have "custom setup" selected, but it'll go right ahead and pick whatever it wants.

Yeah, and then Teams recently went out of its way to ask, "what if we buried Device Settings one more layer down the menu hierarchy?"

We have webex and Teams at work. Neither one of them are great but unless I'm missing something Teams lacked a precheck feature where I can test my Mic before actually joining the meeting which is easily the main reason I despise it. Teams also occasionally just refuses to work with part of my audio setup until I rejoin so it also the one that I need the precheck for most.

Fuck teams! Omg it's garbage. I keep trying to get the company to change, but they're basically getting teams for free.

Headphones are a "lesser known accessory" ???

What about a USB radioactivity detector from 1998?

How does that sound?

If you like you can enable the audio and hear each time a particle hit the Geiger-Mueller tube, right through the headphones.

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