Fairbuds: In-ear with replaceable batteries
shop.fairphone.com
shop.fairphone.com
I'm not convinced the new separate ones are better. Behind the head may still be the better option, and sliding them down around your neck when you need to be social ticks a lot of checkboxes for me as well.
Also there are a disproportionate number of tech people who have ADHD, and multiple small objects do not just have a high probability of getting lost, they have a virtual guarantee of doing so. Multiple times before they are lost forever.
I suspect my particular penchant for wearing through cables isn't super common, but at least for me personally, I find wireless more reliable for that reason.
How many cables are you able to buy for the price of a pair of air pods with broken batteries?
However the main issue isn’t the cost, it’s the fact that I suddenly don’t have a working headphone until I get a new cable.
Go watch any live broadcast of a band past 20 years. You'll notice they use wired, not wireless. Why would they do that? Because the latency is lower, the sound quality is higher, and the bandwidth is higher.
Don't use wireless unless you absolutely need to. And you probably do not.
That being said, I like wireless for a simple reason. No wire near the head is very practical with regards to movement, and I used to destroy 3.5 mm headset wires multiple times a year when I was at school. But those days are long gone.
How do they solve that in live performances (also in talkshows)? They use mics there, and they use some tape or way to attach the mic to clothes.
Not seeing the wires, personally.
The audio quality on these battery powered blue tooth headphones is fucking awful. IM not a purist by any stretch, but a decent pair of head phones is a whole other world of music vs anything AirPods like.
I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but my hearing is pretty good and I'm sensitive to quality loss
Funny that you picked these, I have had 5 different people tell me to try them, and I own a pair.
I have some pretty broad musical tastes. If I throw on some modern, electronic music, or anything pop, these do a pretty good job.
The moment I dip into jazz, into anything where the range between the quiet parts and the loud parts (read pre 1990) is large they just dont perform any more. No amount of EQ is going to make up for that missing range.
The best example of this that I can give is Caltrains A Love Supreme. On something good there is a looming undercurrent in the track, the humming is alive. The track is lifeless on every bluetooth headphone I have heard. Hell even my Sonos speakers in the kitchen do a better job.
https://suno.com/song/2bd9142c-c41c-48fc-b28f-157239b50aee
The prompt was “A jazz instrumental that combines the sensibility of ‘A Love Supreme’ with the feeling of the Caltrain transportation system.”
I cant believe I listened to all of that.
Based on the output they need to train the model again, and remove all the mannheim steamroller.
But you can’t really find a decent budget option on bluetooth. I hate mine and only use them for audiobooks. You could find reasonable budget wired earbuds even 15 years ago.
Even worse, considering that they have to include DACs for speakers anyway, they still refuse to route analog audio out to the type-c connector - just to ensure that cheap passive adapters will not impede their shameless grift.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10719/usbif-publishes-audio-o...
If this is so non-trivial, Chinese OEMs like Huawei have in fact succeeded in analog output. This is despite the fact that their receptacles are on a 50mm long flex PCB, you don't need another 2 signal layers or an extra daughterboard.
The laws of physics are the same everywhere across the world. Just because Apple is incompetent, it does not imply everyone else is.
Here's the rationale than USB-IF gave in the ECN:
>> Few hosts support analog audio accessory. Those that might could be confused when connected to a device supporting corrosion mitigation, but no detrimental behavior should be seen. This should be a corner case of a corner case so likely zero to very low ppm of this condition. Note, any compliant host that supports analog audio accessory today is also required to support digital audio accessories, so there should be no impact to users."
I believe they are referring to Audio adapter accessory mode. What is so complex about two resistors on the CC1 and CC2 pins?
There's no grift here, shameless or otherwise. Apple stopped shipping a headphone jack on their phones for iPhone reasons, and the other manufacturers eventually followed suit because, for all the people on HN who complain about missing headphone jacks, consumers don't actually want them anymore.
It makes very little sense to buy a network-connected device which can’t be updated. And if you say “put Linux on it” it could be argued that you don’t know what tools like phones are for.
TLDR: you get a pocket laptop instead of a phone, despite owning a "phone"
Yes, exactly, thank you. You get a project that never ends instead of a useful tool. Maybe that’s what you want, and that’s fine if so, but that’s not what I want.
I mean, all the power to you if you use it as a daily driver, but I also own one and it’s just a toy, it is so slow.
I always felt that we basically "lost" with open source: Intel did the Management Engine and phones stuck everything in the baseband.
There's no real possibility of having fully software-hackable hardware. Someone else ultimately has control of all hardware, if they want to exercise that control.
One Linux you can still select the internal microphone even with something plugged in the jack port and the mic is still usable.
Whatever OS you're using, you're not magically going to regain access to a physically disconnected signal.
IE an untrusted process running should be able to pick the inbuilt mic.
Maybe linux has permissions around device inputs that can be used to stop this but if a person is worried their untrusted laptop might be listening to them then I suspect such a permission layer is already breached.
At least, that's how my mind parses it. I don't know their actual intention for certain.
Another alternative is 3.5 mm to Bluetooth adapter from your headset. Though those are usually (?) male, and hence only work on a female 3.5 mm.
You can buy these for a couple of EUR/USD on Amazon from any Chinese brand. Fairphone themselves also sell a 3.5 mm to USB-C adapter. But this does not have USB-C pass-through.
These all do have a disadvantage: physical bloat / potentially making device less comfortable.
For example, Sony's headphones have lossless Bluetooth, and so do Samsung's, and the quality of the headphones themselves is quite good, even by audiophile standards, for in-ears.
You can also get bluetooth adapters for traditional IEMs, Fiio and KZ sell good ones.
At the end of the day, there really is no technical reason why bluetooth headphones have to sound any worse than wired headphones.
Maybe, but there are no high end TWS headphones. None of them stand up to even $200 wired IEMs.
>You can also get bluetooth adapters for traditional IEMs, Fiio and KZ sell good ones.
I wouldn't call any of the TWS adapters for IEMs good. I have the Fiio ones, they are a pain in the ass to use and connect. And everyone I've heard from says the KZ are worse than the Fiio ones, so I'm not going to try them.
Get a Bluetooth DAC instead like the Qudelix 5k or Fiio BTR series.
> At the end of the day, there really is no technical reason why bluetooth headphones have to sound any worse than wired headphones.
True, true. I just wish they'd make good bluetooth headphones. I'm sick and tired of dealing with adapters, even the bluetooth ones.
That's completely subjective - Crinacle for example is a popular reviewer and disagrees. By all objective measurements they stand up to many 200$ wired IEMs.
> I wouldn't call any of the TWS adapters for IEMs good. I have the Fiio ones, they are a pain in the ass to use and connect. And everyone I've heard from says the KZ are worse than the Fiio ones, so I'm not going to try them.
> Get a Bluetooth DAC instead like the Qudelix 5k or Fiio BTR series.
I've personally had no issues with use or connection with my KZ adapter - my girlfriend still uses it, and doesn't report any issues (beyond battery life, as it's been 4 years now). I imagine it might also depend on the phone.
> True, true. I just wish they'd make good bluetooth headphones. I'm sick and tired of dealing with adapters, even the bluetooth ones.
I guess it's up to subjectivity. I personally find my wf-1000xm4s and xm5s really quite good after AutoEQ. I'm not the only one either, plenty of reviewers find them, once EQ'd (which is super easy on Android), to be competent IEMs, even compared to other 200$+ wired IEMs.
That's so long as you don't use an iPhone. If you do use an iPhone then yeah, you're screwed as you can't avoid audio compression and you're reliant on manufacturer EQ (though it's perfectly fine for Sony)
AirPods Pro Gen 2 are extremely competitive in audio quality and support lossless (when used with Vision Pro)
Even not so good TWS headphones are more expensive than pretty good wired headphones.
> Sony's headphones have lossless Bluetooth, and so do Samsung's
Unlike Bluetooth which you have to pray to god that it will pick the best codec, wired connection is already lossless.
> there really is no technical reason why bluetooth headphones have to sound any worse than wired headphones.
... until you enable microphone, then it turns into a potato 16kHz mono stream. A successor codec was only finalized in Bluetooth 5.2 and I don't believe there are major earbuds that support LC3 yet.
I would expect so, it's just a more complicated and expensive product to make. Even so, nowadays the difference is quite small.
> Unlike Bluetooth which you have to pray to god that it will pick the best codec, wired connection is already lossless.
I don't have to pray, there is a toggle switch for lossless audio, I just have to select it. It's easy to verify which codec is being used too, it's right there on the app.
And while a wired connection is already lossless, you can risk having a crappy amp on cheaper devices, and often you also have to deal with microphonics from your cables (especially those that have a mic built in). So while it can be as flawless as a lossless codec, it's not always.
> ... until you enable microphone, then it turns into a potato 16kHz mono stream. A successor codec was only finalized in Bluetooth 5.2 and I don't believe there are major earbuds that support LC3 yet.
Sony's headphones do support LC3 as of last week (it came in an update), but yes that's still a valid point as it's only recently being addressed.
I have heard a lot in the past few years of people praising cheap IEM's (I still don't get the difference between IEM's and a pair of wired headphones) and am curious to refresh my iPod Classic to use with some but I wouldn't know where to begin.
As it turns out, the unexpected benefit of not having wires is that the cord doesn't get caught on everything all the time, and that's good enough to overcome the poor battery life for me.
On a similar note, 80% of the time I'm wearing my Sony linkbuds -- the ones with the "they have a hole in them" passthrough, even though they have the shortest battery life of the multiple sets I own.
Realistically, beyond the (not dismissing) "they are trash when the batteries die" aspect of things, taking your headphones out for 10-20 minutes every 4 ish hours... Is probably a good thing for our ears and minds alike.
I actually bought a few pairs of these because I'm afraid they will discontinue them. Their newer model does not have the hole.
What wireless 'buds have only 2 hours of battery life when for just playback?
The first two generations were notorious for connectivity glitches, but the TW3s appear to have fixed everything by. Great ANC, battery life, ear fit.
They even added multipoint through a free software update that came out about a year after launch.
Also, is that latency significant in the first place? Don’t you base it on some bad hardware?
As an aside, mobile games aren't the only thing people play on their phones. I emulate every game console I ever owned on my phone as well as using it for a PC display over Sunshine.
If you still like you want to use your wired headphones, something like the Fiio BTR5 is pretty excellent - you can use it either wired via USB-C for highest quality, or via bluetooth for convenience.
So, the 3.5mm jack can die. I'm now on team "dual USB ports" to solve the charging-while-listening issue. Let's go team!
USB-C to 0.78mm 2-pin or USB-C to MMCX
basically a DAC cable, not a huge fiio dac thing.
There are very interesting in-ear earbuds, but the whole subculture only handles 3.5mm, relying on the phone audio section.
EDIT: I like this list (just one guy):
https://crinacle.com/rankings/iems/
EDIT: I guess I should add his other list:
Isn't that exactly why audiophiles - in the broadest sense, not just the golden cable types - stick with jack headphones? The DACs and amps built into headphones, or even earbuds, being very likely subpar compared to the one they can pick separately.
Headphone DACs/amps have been a thing forever and they're typically the size of a pack of cigarettes.
(Disclaimer: I made peace with BT since getting the Sony WH-1000XM4 earbuds, and later WH-1000HM4 headphones. I got them originally for the noise cancelling and LDAC support, but they're good enough that I don't hear a major difference with my friend's fancy Audio Technica)
I've still got a phone with a headphone jack, clinging onto life so not something I've investigated. Surely that's going to be the direction for folks who want an analogue socket?
https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/categories/headphone-amplif...
They range from desktop-sized, to dongle-sized, e.g.: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/penon-os133-type-c-to-3-5mm...
(I know the head-fi forums have a certain... reputation, but I'd rather link them than one of the SEO spam lists)
The point is, the handset's output over USB-C is digital! You're not stuck with whatever analog components it includes (or doesn't), those can be swapped out pretty easily.
But you still can't charge it while you've got your headphones in.
It sounds so much better than using the 3.5mm jack given the use of the onboard DAC.
I love my AirPod Pros.
They may not have the best sound but having noise cancelling headphones I can keep my pocket is transformative.
I love that there’s no cable to pick up mechanical noise as it catches on things.
What I don’t love is buying more Apple stuff or knowing their batteries can’t be replaced.
When my AirPods break I’ll be in the market for these.
Given that Fairbuds would sell you a single earbud, that's already an improvement over buying a new set, right?
We're talking about the sustainability of the products design since that's what the manufacturer can control, not the behavior of the customers which the manufacturer can't control.
I'll likely upgrade once the EU finally forces all phone companies to release phones with user replaceable batteries, and someone produces a phone that isn't gigantic. There aren't any medium sized phones any more. Everything's half a foot long.
https://www.reddit.com/r/S22Ultra/comments/u6dstg/anyone_els...
(I have a Fairphone 4)
Personally, I could never stand using wired headphones with my phone, so I wouldn't want to do it. But the option's there.
(Used wired on-ears and IEMs for a while, tried using an adapter for a bit, switched to Bluetooth over-ears recently. Appreciate the convenience, don’t appreciate One More Thing I Must Charge.)
That said, they certainly make much more sense Financially. I’ve spent far more money on headphones since going wireless.
Additionally, unlike a 3.5mm jack, you don't need to deal with a 'sound card' that can handle almost anything you can plug into it. You get to tailor your headphone/headset drivers specifically to your attached devices. The general-purpose device that can handle anything you can throw at it costs much more.
Regular headphones.
It's just wire and magnets, with some plastic.
But the floppy drive was supplanted by other means of data transfer and storage that were broadly perceived to be bigger/better/faster/stronger.
Is there some aspect of active headphones that is bigger/better/faster/stronger than regular passive headphones?
Wireless earbuds being repairable is great, but you don't need to remove the jack for that.
The material and monetary cost of the number of wired headphones I've destroyed in the 6 years before I got wireless head phones (because there was no realistic way to stow the cabling for the activity I was involved in) probably approaches the cost of the 2 pairs of wireless headphones I've owned in the last 6 years.
I don't think they cut the headphone jack just to sell these headphones. While it is true that you can make a headphone jack as water-resistant as the rest of the phone, every hole you put in the phone adds to the design and assembly cost to maintain the same IP rating. And each hole significantly adds to the complexity of repairing that phone in such a way that it maintains that IP rating after the repair.
A set of small wireless headphones uses far less material than a large pair of wired headphones. Not saying it is a direct replacement, just that everything has some environmental impact, and fretting over one tiny device misses the forest for the trees.
I've lost either the earbuds or case of so many wireless earbuds during the past 4 years that I could have afforded 2-3 much higher quality wired earbuds.
I probably outed myself as an old with the latter question ;)
Keys: All the time. Now I have a tile on them.
Pens: lol yes, it’s why I’ve never tried to get into very-nice pens.
I’d have lost my AirPods several times without find my. I’m certain I’d not have managed to keep both buds more than a couple months if I weren’t very diligent about putting them back in the case when I’m not actively using them.
I'm saying that for the objectives Fair set out for themselves, dropping the headphone jack is low-hanging fruit. Its one more piece that fails, it fails as a consequence of normal use (there's no way to baby the headphone jack, or the power jack, in such a way that it doesn't eventually fail from repeated usage. Indeed, they're explicitly rated for number of cycles (typically around 5000 for a headphone jack, which is consistent with daily usage for 3 years, well below their 5 year warranty. By comparison, I'm seeing 20k cycles for a cheap usb-c port, which is a lot more defensible for a 5 year warranty)), and it makes maintaining their IP rating after a repair much harder (doubly so, given that they want users to be able to repair their phones).
All for a feature that, given the price point, won't even be used by the majority of users.
Don't get me wrong the replacement cables can often run like $50 but still, it's not exactly breaking the headphone
I love my wxm4s but I'm on my third pair due to battery life. Wish they had user replaceable batteries... Heck at least for the case
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU7E2AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm-...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/AGPtek-Streambot-Mini-Bluetooth-W...
And most people who say "just use the dongle" are not using the dongle.
It's also less reliable than the builtin port, kinda like HDMI dongles but not as bad. My earbuds' inline mic wasn't working with them, idk why but it was fine using the jack. Sometimes my phone didn't realize headphones were plugged into the dongle and it kept using its internal speakers. Irritating when you can't rely on basic functionality like that.
Lastly, leaving the dongle plugged in can wear out the port as others have said, and you also won't be able to charge at the same time. Particularly an issue in cars; I even tried wireless charging and found that my phone overheated if it was also running nav.
With all those caveats added, the dongled jack is far more hassle than Bluetooth, and it's not because BT is particularly good. iPhones had both for several years, and BT headphones never really took off until the built-in jack was removed.
Headphone jacks were a major wear item on older smartphones, and waterproofing them is very annoying as well, requiring a ton of adhesives. I had to take the back glass off my old Xperia Z2C three times over its life to replace the headphone jack, and the waterproofing was totally shot after doing so. At the end of the day, I honestly don’t mind the trade off, although I can see how it can be annoying for others.
I've had the area around jacks get scratched over the years, but I've never had them fail due to mechanical wear. Is this common for others?
I've certainly had the micro and mini USB ports fail on me over the years though.
MiniUSB was a busted connector design from the start, which is why the industry moved to Micro USB so quickly. Many MiniUSB receptacles in the wild were failing after thousands or even hundreds(!) of insertions.
Not a problem (like, never) once I switched to Apple… but then they removed the jacks.
But as others have mentioned, I too have had quite a few Micro-USB and USB-C connectors fail over the years. But almost never the trusty old and dearly missed minijack.
I ended up buying a small battery-powered Bluetooth-to-3.5mm receiver that I keep in my left pocket, and then send Bluetooth audio to it from my phone in my right pocket. It's a pretty ridiculous setup.
As an electronics guy the jack is rarely the issue, a TRS jack has spring contacts inside, so wear should not be an issue unless they use the shittiest of connectors or you actually damage the bonding between connector and PCB. It is 100 times more likely for the plug to fail and a 1000 times more likely for the cable to fail.
I've not seen the same failure in TRS connectors in a long time now, but I think that's mainly because few people actually use them.
Most jacks do just fine, but having the springs eventually wear out on some device or another wasn't uncommon for me 6+ years ago. Not having to worry about whether the jack is going to suck or not on a given product suits me just fine. Having it attached to an adapter means I can easily swap it out if it wears.
That said, some of the sibling comments are reporting wear on USB-C receptacles when used while running... The mechanical design of the Apple Lightning connector seems to me like it'd be more durable, since it's tapered and doesn't have that center alignment thing. But maybe the contact springs of Lightning wear out faster as a result? I haven't seen any data on this, just speculating.
Sounds like you want usb type c! In addition to Audio Adapter Accessory Mode which allows it to drive a couple pins with analog audio exactly like the 3.5mm jacks (and therefore enabling completely passive adapters to support devices with 3.5mm jacks), usb type c also supports charging, high speed data, and video. That's a lot more universal than some silly jack that can only support audio.
Unfortunately it looks like at least the fairphone 4 didn't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode and I haven't found information on whether the fairphone 5 supports it. Definitely a mark against the company if they don't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode.
I am still using the XM3 - both the earbud and case batteries are repleacable.
The noise cancelling gets slightly better each iteration. There's another thing the 3 and 4 are better at than the 5: easier to get out of the charging case.
Also, while you could replace the batteries in each of these versions, the IP rating would be in practice regressed.
This is awesome. At first I thought they cheated and only made the case battery replaceable.
You seem to belong to group of consumers that wants to compromise lifespan and sustainability in favor of features and price. That's fine, but it simply means you are not their target audience for this product.
At its core, It's an ultra-low-power microcontroller, and the low-power requirements to hit the battery life specification while maintaining audio quality may or may not allow the kind of software abstractions that make these codecs "just software". Once you've licensed the codec, you then have to implement it on the micro's architecture, in a way that's actually performant. Which in turn may or may not require actual Assembly work.
So the underlying idea of my post ("you can't just add new codecs in software") is ultimately correct, but for reasons completely unrelated to what I mentioned. That is, I'm wrong, but sort of stumbled into the right answer. Doubly interesting.
Now I have a ton of questions about how bluetooth audio is produced on the phone side, so that headphones only have to decode one (or a few) codec on the other side.
And no one cares enough about the duplex audio stuff for it to matter. Phone and Zoom calls sound decent enough with pretty much all bluetooth devices now. If you care about that you'll be using a real microphone anyway and can have the headphones not in duplex mode.
All they need are existing customers buy in these new product lines
I got attached to my AirPods Max. They allow me to have meetings next to people who are also in meetings. Even if they are in the same meeting.
I know what you mean, but still had to laugh :)
What's worse is that if/when the market demands replaceable batteries, it's an easy feature for everyone else to clone.
Also the batteries would have to be ordered as a spare part years after the product launched, and most cheap manufacturers are horrible with sustained support.
Because the market demands it
(Well, their investors might see it a little differently, but Fairphone is never going to be a unicorn company no matter what.)
It just seems like a lot of overhead for something nobody is going to use in practice.
I have since bought a phone with a headphone jack and stopped buying wireless headphones.
Old generation, wired Bose in-ear go for under $50 on eBay. Sound quality is better too.
The wire interfering with my jacket took some getting used to again.
EDIT: oh yeah, the batteries don’t die while you’re using wired headphones, either. No more 1-ear’ing so there’s always a bud with battery.
One of the first steps to recycle an earbud would be to remove the battery and handle that separately from the plastic and metal.
They also sell refurbished AirPods. With the right tools and process, it's just a bit of time, solder, and fresh adhesive. Impractical to do at home, but at scale, it can be done.
The goal should be to reduce and reuse before resorting to recycling. Our dependency on new electronics should be brought down to marginal utility, and we should be enabled to re-use unsupported, partially-broken or repaired smartphones. Instead, we're corralled into a box of compatibility and told to trade-in once we get angry enough at our OEM. I know I'm not the only one with a box of iPods that can do precisely jack-shit now that Apple doesn't update them anymore.
- pro: 10 EUR for a pair of replacement batteries for the earbuds vs ~20 EUR for a pair of VARTA batteries with shipping from Germany
- pro: 13 EUR for a new battery for the case. I need to go to aliexpress to find a replacement battery for the galaxy buds plus case
- pro: replacement process seems to be way easier because it was designed to be replaceable unlike galaxy buds plus
- pro: lighter than the buds: ~5g vs 6.3g
- pro: ANC
- con: more expensive. I paid half the price for the buds. But that was in 2020 money.
- con: they are bigger: 28.7 x 24.6 x 21mm vs 17.5 x 22.5 x 19.2mm
Personally, I was completely happy with the sound quality of my first TWS (FreeBuds 3). The only reason I felt I needed new ones was a failing battery in one of the buds.
[1] https://www.rtings.com/headphones/graph/23318/frequency-resp...
Something built to last for ten years would be intriguing. I'm still using my Samsung Galaxy Buds+ from 2020 as my daily driver. I prefer the capsule case to the box design of later models, and all of the internals are still "good enough" that I haven't really felt the need to upgrade. Even the lack of ANC hasn't been a dealbreaker--the passive noise cancellation just from having a solid seal around the ear has been enough to happily use on a plane.
Should have fairphone branded on the the case insetad of fairbud.
On-ear headphones hurt my earlobes and over-ear headphones make my head get hot so I can't seem to find happiness anywhere. The custom eartips I think have gotten me the closest though!
https://eartune.com/products/eartune-fidelity-a-pro
Edit: Note that these DO NOT fit inside the Airpods case, you'll need to remove them each time.
Either way I have to remember to turn off Bluetooth on the phone, because who's going to manually unpair and repair.
And the earbuds have no light on them in one case (Ankers) and no obvious way to turn them off without listening to a chime (Shures).
I'd like to just blame Bluetooth out of spite, but it seems perhaps a limitation of the drivers of those devices.
I'm looking to "upgrade" but only because the batteries in my current pair are shot. It feels so bad to have things like this just go into a landfill when they're perfectly fine other than the battery.
edit: oh, these are also 5x as expensive as the $30 earbuds I bought 2 years ago that have a really decent sound profile. Oooof. Sustainable, at a 5x premium? :/
I’m not really looking to spend, overtime, 250 bucks every 3 years on AirPods and seeing Anker space a40s are $40 with this multipoint feature and 10ths of battery life I am tempted to run away from apple or any ear phones above $100 but when Bluetooth is bad, it can be really bad.
The only issue I've come across though is many earbuds will only play one audio source at a time. Which is annoying but further hampered by some audio sources that will emit an imperceptible audio signal even when they aren't playing any sound, causing the earbuds to never switch away from that device.
Like your cheap ones certainly don't have ANC which can be a dealbreaker. Other important things are responsive touch control, good set of microphones, app with equalizer, ear detection, wearing comfort...
For my main use case (podcasts), the sound quality is actually the least important aspect of headphones.
The only criticism that holds is that these have touchy touch controls, but for a cost savings of $120, and that being the only compromise for me, it's a no-brainer.
This blog is invaluable. I bought a number of the sub-$50 pairs a couple years back, and compared them against my favorite wired IEMs. They're not the same of course, but damn good for the money. https://www.scarbir.com/guide/best-sounding-wireless-earphon... I wear them 6+ hours a day, or did when the battery was in better health.
If you skim the reviews, you'll see that there are a number of them that have good frequency response, comfort, multi-point. ANC is more or less table stakes, from what I can tell. Etc. Things change fast, you really don't have to spend $100 to get decent earbuds. Hell, even the Galaxy Buds FE, which are very well reviewed can be had for $70USD.
EDIT: Actually, the very latest blog post is pretty descriptive of this: https://www.scarbir.com/tws/cheapest-airpods-like-earbuds-al... (One of the top on the list the successor to the pair I've been rocking since 2022.)
Without mentioning the model I have to believe you, although at least where I live, you can't get ANC earbuds for $30 today, let alone 2 years ago.
> Things change fast, you really don't have to spend $100 to get decent earbuds.
It's a matter of what you value. I use my earbuds every day, and good ergonomics is something I'm willing to pay a bit more. I was recently researching headphones and there was always some ergonomic compromise. It might be a good value if price is an important concern for you, but it's just not worth to compromise in this aspect for me.
Ill have long replaced them before i need a new battery due to degredation. Wireless earbuds are a massivly oveesaturated market and you can get comparable earbuds for <$20.
I suspect this is fair co losing its way and engaging in blatent greenwashing.
It's not a carbon-copy of Apple's approach, but I've had issues with iCloud switching too so I'm rather glad it's not. Plus, the Multipoint approach works with all my weird stuff like my Switch and smart TV.
I hate multipoint bluetooth. It only seems to work in the most basic of scenarios and nobody appears to have been testing the damn thing out of that in real life. Yes Bose I'm looking at you.
Good <deity> that is stupid hellhole of having audio stolen from you because some audio happened to play on the second device because you (or an unattended browser autoupdate) (re)opened some youtube tab, or constant nags about "foo disconnected / foo connected" when at range limit, or you took a call on your computer and moved and got out of range and sure enough it swaps to your phone which decides "oh sure you probably want to enjoy some loud music" and helpfully proceeds to blow your eardrums.
<Deity> forbids you have more than two regularly used devices in which case it's completely useless anyway.
Meanwhile my Beyerdynamic is not multipoint, it merely remembers what it has been paired to (I'm up to six devices now) and just connects to the last one on power up. If I want to use them from another previous one I just pop in bluetooth quick settings and choose "connect to FreeBYRD" which disconnects them from the other one, y'know, like we used to do when there were actual wires plugged into actual physical plugs, which BT is a glorified copperless version of anyway.
I can believe that some manufacturers dropped the ball on it, but none of my headsets are really that finnecky. Jabra, Sony, JBL, Samsung and even Skullcandy all seem to have good implementations from what I've seen. Fundamentally, any protocol-level solution is better than playing Monkey in the Middle with Bluetooth MAC addresses online.
If you're not running into that situation very often, then you're not going to consider problems with it a problem. Personally, between my personal phone and laptop, and my work phone and laptop, turning off Bluetooth isn't a good enough solution, especially because I also have a Bluetooth keyboard, and mouse in the mix as well.
It just turns out that two clicks/taps when I want my headphones from the device I'm currently using is a mindboggingly more simple, consistent, and reliable solution than whatever a headphone's vendor firmware tries to intuit about what I actually want to do from the fact that it's receiving audio.
for context: you can get better sounding non-anc tws for a third of the price, or good budget anc options under 100 usd. i have been personally using a pair of jabra (non-anc) for more than past couple years that i bought for under 40 usd on discount.
if they sell individual headphone for those who lost an individual piece for a fair price, perhaps there is a niche for them in terms of value. otherwise the one-off just buy a new pair for competing offerings are very close alternatives.
I'm also curious if the noise cancelling is any good... I'm tired of being locked into overpriced low quality Bose products, but historically they have been the only ones with truly good noise cancelling. As I have ADHD I need really good noise cancelling to do my job in an open work environment.
Lastly, I'm wondering what the deal is with the earbud tips, as I've found I often need a custom or weird sized one to get things to stay in my ear. The Bose ones generally work for me, as they come with a large array of sizes, but the photos make this look like just a single size.
I'll keep an eye on these- if I can answer these 3 questions/issues I'll buy a set.
For earbud tips - you can get aftermarket replacements of many sizes and shapes for cheap. Look on Amazon or Alibaba, but some brands are more well known like Spinfit.
As for active noise cancellation - my experience has been that anything outside of Bose or Sony is only OK at best. I doubt these are any better than the average set out there. But with the right aftermarket tips you can improve the quality of isolation on cheaper earbuds significantly.
EDIT: others have pointed out that the batteries are indeed standardized.
https://www.heise.de/news/Fairphone-Fairbuds-In-Ears-mit-Wec...
It's 2024; how come companies like Sony, Panasonic, Energizer and Duracell haven't jumped on offering one or two standard replaceable lithium-ion cells, with integrated circuit protection and slim enough for modern consumer electronics, that people can buy off-the-shelf in drug stores? Many devices are still running on alkaline batteries these days, like smoke detectors and kitchen scales.
It didn't take that long in the old days for standards like AA and AAA batteries to hit the market, and they didn't worry too much about applying them to new chemistries with differing voltages. And with efficient DC-DC converters that are cheap enough to introduce into consumer electronics, battery voltage hardly even matters that much nowadays.
AA and AAA Nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries exist, but it doesn't seem anyone ever made a li-ion equivalent.
In order for them to function: They've each got charge circuitry, buck converter circuitry (to get down from 5v to ~3.7v lithium voltage for charging, and from ~3.7v lithium voltage down to 1.5v to be compatible with end-user devices), and each one includes its own USB C port.
However a major issue is that the charging circuitry/method/design is not standard for rechargeable versions of non-rechargeable standard batteries. So you often need to remove it and charge it with a charging system from the battery manufacturer instead of charging in place.
[1] Many manufacturers, possibly a single factory somewhere in China.
Sadly, they were crap and stopped working after one charge. More e-waste.
(I also quite like that they only have one model so it's easy to decide which one to get)
* Fair supply chains. This was their original selling point and is still an incredible unique feature. They changed cobalt and copper supply chains and established tracing mechanisms that now other manufacturers can also use.
* Self-repairable. I switched two screens so far, probably not a huge cost difference to the neighbourhood dirty phone repair shop, but I feel better about it.
* Social enterprise, giving back to the community
* Nice to know my funds go mostly to a good cause and everyone in the supply and production chain is treated well (they even pay a premium to manufacturers so workers at the assembly line get paid a fair wage).
I am well aware it's not the best phone. It's rather clunky, camera used to be weak (got much better with the latest update), and I had some small issues. But overall a solid phone, I support a de kind of ecosystem that really improves things down the line and I don't need to feed Sony or Apple execs money.
* Fair supply chains:
After many years of working in Quality Control and Quality Assurance, Supplier Quality Management (I've been on both ends with this one) and related fields (lead auditor, product safety, material safety) for companies large and small, I can safely say that "fair supply chains" is just a marketing fairy tale. Without going too deep into this rabbit hole:
A) You only have so many suppliers. If they don't comply, and unless their performance and/or behavior significantly affects your reputation, contrary to the common belief, you don't just go to somebody else. You give them another opportunity. If they keep failing, you change your evaluation specs, wait a year, and repeat. This becomes a thousand times more of an issue once you include China and generally other countries outside the US and Europe (there are exceptions) into the equation. B) Good luck auditing suppliers in China. C) Good luck finding experienced auditors. They are incredibly rare and expensive. You cannot outsource it either. D) The auditing process is expensive. That's why even the largest companies in toy manufacturing do not audit their supply chains end-to-end. Instead, you have your direct suppliers sign documents binding them to cascade your rules downstream. What happens when you find out they don't? See A.
Should I go on?
Anyone know?
The sound quality of $30 Bluetooth earbuds from no-name vendors is plenty good enough in the terrible acoustic environments I use them. If you want good sound quality, no earbud is ever going to come close to a good set of full-size headphones, so I'd prefer to invest money in those instead.
Yeah, active noise cancellation would be nice but I imagine that the next generation of cheapie earbuds will have that too.
While I get the desire for reducing environmental impact, the total mass of these earbuds is so small that it hardly seems worrying about in terms of the millions of tons of crap that goes into landfill every year.
- Moondrop is a pretty well known brand in the ChiFi (Chinese Hi-Fi) space.
- They support AAC so they even have good audio quality on Apple/iPhone devices (most cheap earbuds only use cheap Android codecs).
- Normally, their latency is pretty high, but they do have a low-latency mode in case you ever want to play games + take a call.
- It's Bluetooth 5.3 and communicates directly to each earbud (e.g. if you want, you can only use one at a time).
- And, they have active noise cancellation that's surprisingly good (in fact, it's amazing for $25!).
IMO, the main downsides are:
- Their app is meant to be horrible (I didn't even bother to install it). Not a big deal, unless you want to play around with EQ, customizing what the touch controls do, or upgrade the firmware.
- There's no way to control the volume via touch controls (although maybe the app allows you to change this)
- Even though it supports Bluetooth 5.3, I don't think it supports Bluetooth LE Audio and the LC3 codec.
These earbuds are probably completely uneconomical to recycle, but at least at $25, they probably didn't have too much of an environmental impact when they were created (assuming that the cost of the item is roughly correlated with the environmental impact of the item).
“Meet the world's most repairable premium earbuds.”
Okay, if you’re going to lead with This as your flagship feature… well, that says to me they must be complete garbage. Is this a joke?
Why did they not use a standard battery like a 18350 or 16340 for the case? Other advantages too (easy to find alternative chargers and can keep a charged spare).
I presume size constraints would make it difficult to find a commodity battery size for the earbuds?