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dguest

They do indeed have a lot of nice features:

- Intuitive pairing interface

- Built in lanyards

- Excellent bass response

- Standard connection protocol

- Infinite battery life

- Unbreakable encryption

Wires can be great. Unfortunately it seems like high quality wired ear buds are getting harder to find: a lot of distributors seem to have swapped them out for the wireless version of the same product.

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Hi-end wired in-ears / headphone won't go away anytime soon thank god. Having firefly dac and sennheiser ie-900 in addition to AirPods would give you access to Apple Music hi-res lossless on the go. The only problem is - after having used AirPodsPro 2 my tolerance for street noise is extremely low and noise cancellation kind of competes with reference sound reproduction features in a lot of products I think.

I would add what is probably the #1 benefit, IMO: zero lag.

> - Intuitive pairing interface

Yes. They always connect to the exact device I wish them to connect to and not some other device, thus forcing me to play the bluetooth shuffle game.

I mean sure, those upsides are nice, but don’t you hate it when your wires get a knot in them? Ruins your whole day.

Totally worth having to deal with charging, fiddly volume controls, losing them, and the complexity and power usage needed to transmit audio to them wirelessly, to eliminate that possibility from ever happening again.

> harder to find

Get into IEMs (in ear monitors), there's plenty to choose, with different sound signatures and excellent sound quality. Most IEMs also have detachable cables!

The worst thing about bluetooth headphones is that people who use them subject everyone else to their awful microphone quality while either oblivious or in denial about the fact.

I've reviewed old meeting recordings, when my notes were not clear/complete, and after getting over what I sound like generally (an issue on any recording device!) I sound clearer than some people who are using wired headsets. I'm actually using a bone-conduction headpiece (Shokz OpenRun, a friend has some from a different manufacturer and he sounds fine too when using them for a phone call) so it might be even more surprising that I sound reasonable.

If someone does have a problem with how I sound then they can buy me a decent wired headset, or just stop inviting me to remote meetings that I don't want to be in anyway :)

Shokz products work surprisingly well and the sound has also gotten a lot better. I commend them for keeping to the same formula and iterating on it. The microphone was better than the Sony headphones last time I tried them.

My comment was unnecessarily inflammatory, apologies for that. I do concur about unnecessary meetings!

> Unbreakable encryption

All wired earphones I have ever used had a line connect which is analog and completely unencrypted. What wired earphones have you had that where encrypted?

I think the GP meant that in theory someone could break into a Bluetooth connection and snoop on your phone calls. But with a wired headset, there's nothing to break into. "Unbreakable encryption" is a bit tongue-in-cheek, there.

> there's nothing to break into

Wired headphones are giving off EMI of the signal they're playing, one could sense that signal with the right equipment and know what you're listening to remotely.

The advantage here is that you need a physical connection to decrypt the content.

Eh... If your adversary can break modern bluetooth encryption, I probably... would not bet on this? I would think that with appropriate radio equipment you can probably pick up audio from many wired headphones.

bluetooth encryption has been broken before. "KNOB" (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec19-antonioli.pdf) was less than 5 years ago. The kind of equipment that could pick up the audio over a wired headset from across the room could probably pick up something from the speakers of wireless earbuds too.

I wonder if there are attacks based on RF emissions along a cable to get the sound

Yes, there are. You can even get video signals from a video cable.

Not if you have a good microphone and the sound is loud

That's not a failure of the protocol but of the user. It's like saying PGP for email can be broken if you have a telescope to look at the user's screen.

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