Wired headphone sales are exploding
bbc.com
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- They don't need charging. Charging may seem like a minor inconvenience, and we're used to charging a lot of devices. However, even a minor inconvenience is still an inconvenience.
- They're harder to lose. When Apple almost immediately started selling accessories to connect their airpods together (i.e. Cables), it was pretty obvious that going completely cordless was not entirely superior.
- For an equivalent price point, wired headphones produce higher quality audio, and the top-end is a lot deeper.
- Wired cans don't need to pair, don't glitch out, don't become laggy, pair with the wrong device, etc.. Bluetooth was never really meant for use as an audio connection, and it's never really become 100% foolproof. With Apple's proclivity for proprietary standards, I'm amazed they (or others) haven't rolled their own wireless audio standard by now.
Too many android phones copied Apple and ditched the venerable audio jack, but a few kept it, and I've always insisted on it when buying phones. It's old but far from obsolete.
Very few headphones support BLE Audio, and you need to enable some experimental Bluez flags for it to work on Linux, but both of these should improve with time. But it makes such a huge difference that I'd argue that it's worth the effort, even right now.
[0]: https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enha...
BLE Audio offers lower need for charging and better (but not equivalent) audio. So 2/4 are not as bad with BLE Audio (and arguably only 1 since you still need to charge). The other two 2/4 are related to the form factor. Wireless headphones have advantages but they are not the decisive winner.
Granted, I've only ever done multiple connections on Linux so maybe it's a Linux problem.
I think (?) that it's possible with Classic Bluetooth too, but like everything else with Classic Bluetooth, it's kinda buggy and unreliable.
> I'm no audiophile but in my experience, the audio quality noticeably drops when multiple devices are connected (I've only ever had at most two at a time).
I haven't personally noticed any audio quality difference with two devices connected over BLE, but I've never tried to play audio simultaneously from two sources. My phone and my laptop both auto-connect to my headphones, so I usually have two devices connected simultaneously, but I only ever play audio from one at a time.
As you've seen, the documentation on LE Audio is rather horrible. The Android documentation [1] is semi-useful even on other platforms, and the official book [2] is also helpful if you're willing to wade through a ton of dense technical details, but there's not really much else available on the internet. I've had to spend an annoying amount of time tracing stuff with Wireshark and reading through the specifications [3] (which are thankfully free) and the BlueZ source code [4] to figure stuff out.
(The poor documentation mostly only matters if you're trying to do something specific; LE Audio mostly "just works" on Android out-of-the-box and Linux after you change the single config setting from [0])
[0]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2025/11/24/impl...
[1]: https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/bluetooth...
[2]: https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Introdu...
I should point out that unlike the other reply I haven't really bothered researching it at all, I just upgraded from a non-LE pair to a LE pair recently.
I don't want to connect to multiple devices. I want to select one device and be 100% certain that it's switched to that device as a source. Even with 100% Apple devices this is not perfectly reliable with bluetooth.
Putting the cable in another audio jack makes it physically impossible that the audio comes from the wrong source or to the wrong output device. And it is a lot more convenient than untangling the mess once the bluetooth devices get confused about what to do and requiring you to manually disable bluetooth at some devices just so it gets the message.
Do you mean real time like games? “Wireless” headsets are perfectly fine and usable. Real time audio? Wireless transmitters and receivers exist and are used (granted with wireless in-ears but IMO that’s mostly so the don’t fall out) at the absolute highest level of audio production and live events.
You definitely can’t just say wireless isn’t used for real time.
Gaming headsets are usually 2.4GHz wireless, and pro audio stuff is ~500-800MHz and the proper stuff requires a wireless license to use.
Real time audio exists for sure. But it doesn't use Bluetooth, and nobody here cares about it, not to mention the amount of investment needed for equipment.
This is just being pedantic.
There is not even a USB-Bluetooth adapter that would enable LE Audio on Linux. (Besides the hacky ones that contain a full Bluetooth stack and present as USB-Audio, but those come with their own problems.)
Surely you can do real-time with analog RF?
And you're correct that wired phones have a lot of advantages.
Tack on that they don't have latency, though I've never really tried to track vocals on wireless cans. I have a pretty nice collection of what I consider to be quality mid-tier stuff for my studio (hd280, dt770, mdr7506, k240), and I think they mostly sound better and I can use them longer than I can use the various wireless stuff I use.
And the "real" UHF wireless audio I use professionally (well, to collect rather than listen to audio) is very reliable and good sounding but also, like, $1000/ch once it's cased and cabled and properly accessorized.
However, for almost all of my day to day listening I use either airpods or a some bluetooth'd 3M ear muffs. I even went back to airpods after going through both wired and other wireless solutions.
I don't enjoy having my in-ears ripped out along with my pocket. And universally the cord ends and the physical connector on my phone are the weak spots that have had me replace stuff- I haven't bought a phone in the 5 years since I got one that could charge wirelessly and never has phones plugged into it, and I don't intend to get another one any time soon (knock on wood that my case keeps the screen from breaking and needing me to repair it).
I have a bluetooth receiver with an analog out that I keep in my workbox, which I used for program music at a show tonight. It's nice to start my truck and my podcast just starts playing, too, without having to get out my phone and plug it in.
You're right that wired stuff is better for some things. I still find wireless stuff to be superior in a lot of situations.
The truth is that the OS usually hides the latency of wireless heapdhones, e.g. airpods, by delaying video to keep it in sync. The real latency is somewhere around 100-400ms if the RF environment is crowded. Even worse is that the latency isn't actually constant, but drifts all the time.
At many IT conferences organized by hackspaces, everything is done by volunteers, including broadcast and video/audio postproduction. And that is actually one of the most common issues: our volunteers use wireless headphones even if we ask them repeatedly not to.
We cut talks in postproduction primarily based on audio, e.g., when does the applause start/end, when does the speaker's introduction start/end, etc. Obviously, that doesn't work reliably if the audio latency is nondeterministic.
Even worse, as different venues have different audio setups, there are sometimes real audio/video sync issues that need to be fixed. But if our volunteers are using wireless headphones, they won't just set the wrong offset, but they end up trying to fix issues that don't even exist.
And then you get complaints from viewers that e.g. the livestream audio/video is out of sync, even though it's not. The issue turns out to be caused by the viewer's laptop and wireless headphones not supporting the latency compensation technique I explained earlier. And there's nothing we can do about that.
Wireless headphones tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and made it worse. In German, we'd call that "verschlimmbessern".
Right, but that only works when you control both. I love my Sony and Shure Bluetooth headphones and have 0 issues watching videos with them; they work great even on Linux.
But when people figure they're gonna use BT headsets for conferencing, it just turns into a shitshow of people waiting for the other to speak, then starting to speak at the same time.
I have an old Jabra headset for my video call needs, and it uses DECT. That thing has so little latency that I can use it to play FPS games without issues (I'm by no means a competitve player, so YMMV). At the same time, its range is huuuge. For the life of me, I cannot understand why nobody makes such headsets anymore: they've all switched to BT for some reason. The only models that seem to still use some form of low-latency transmission are some "gamer" models, but I've never tried one.
wireless headphones externalize the cost of latency to other conference participants. if you think your airbuds are "perfectly fine" it's because you're not the one paying the cost.
Though I've been working with writing software for esp32 and so that might change in the next month or so.
I think you are going to far here.
Do wireless headphones have problems? Sure. Did they fix some problems wired headphones had? Yes. Yes, they did.
Simply the ability of moving around without having to worry about the cable getting tangled or dragging the headphones or the phone is phenomenal. My wireless headphones are a lot more reliable than my previous wired ones. Somehow the cable and the connector was always the source of failures.
Do you not like wireless headphones? Don’t buy them. I will keep buying wireless headphones because they have clear benefits to me in my usage.
I find it insulting that you represent your preference as some universal truth.
How do you rate those?
I made my own, but they sucked balls. I have some Plantronic cans which have ~10db nrr, but they are falling apart now, and I'm looking for alternatives with decent NRR
To be clear, these are for noise protection and are heavy. They are big enough that I have another pair of muffs for shooting rifles and some ($$) molded westone earplugs for working on loud stages.
I mostly use the 3m when I am running a chainsaw or driving vehicles with the windows down (I find that too damn loud for my tastes). For a while I'd track drums with them over my shure se215, but I've started playing quieter and have found that something like an HD280 cuts stuff down enough to track drums while feeling more comfortable.
On one hand, they are kind of expensive, bulky, and the mic isn't great. Also their "ambient sound" is not anywhere near as loud or controllable as the muffs I use for shooting. On the other hand, they pair well, sound okay, have a lot of noise reduction, and they seem pretty rugged. They run on AAs and Battery life is pretty good, too.
AA batteries b/c then it'll "last forever", 3M b/c it's basically passive noise cancellation, BlueTooth so it'll connect to phones (hopefully without that digital static that I'll hear with some BT devices). The AM/FM portion is an anti-feature, but mandatory to get access to AA power.
Can you imagine Europe's reaction? They'd fine Apple to the moon -- no innovation allowed unless it interoperates with other products that don't exist yet.
Are you claiming no other wireless earphones exist other than apples'??
And they'd be right to do so. The correct approach to creating a new standard is plan interoperability from the start. If a vendor plans lock in by introducing a new standard, they should get shut down immediately and told to do better.
It is interesting to just glance at the history of USB [0] through that lens was originally developed, and it is interesting to see that as I would have predicted the group of companies that developed USB (MS, IBM, Compaq, etc) seem to be disjoint from the companies listed as precursor technologies (looks like that was especially an Apple-led consortium of hardware manufacturers organised around firewire [1]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Patent_consideration...
And that leaves you with two standards (at least), non interoperable between them. In the case of hardware this can be really annoying, constraining and inefficient both for consumers and at large.
A downside of existing standards is it means it is quite hard to innovate on them.
And the iPhone supports all of the USB C standards that computers support - audio, video, mass storage, network, keyboard, mice etc
Many superior technologies have been killed by patents and the greediness of the patent owners has been futile and they gained very little from their patents, because people have always preferred something cheaper, even if less good, so the inferior USB has easily won against IEEE 1394.
The patent owners that hope to gain too much from their patents always forget that instead of paying a too big royalty it is always possible to circumvent the patent by using an alternative solution, even if that is inferior.
Products that don't exist yet... so, future innovation? No innovation allowed unless it incentivises and streamlines further innovation? Count me in!
They sound worse, if clarity is your goal. And they are huge and wear out. I agree with you 99%, I just wanted to point out that across some dimensions they are the superior technology.
I’m not sure how, its an aesthetic choice but an inferior technology by every metric that counts.
Candles still have a place, we still buy them, but we can’t reasonably call them superior either- even if, candles actually would have a real advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that.
Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved. For example, if the artist knows their channel is noisy and band-limited they can get a lot more liberal with the kinds of samples they use throughout. CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television. The medium becomes so transparent that it causes upstream shocks in every other part of the process. You can no longer rely on the camera or audio chain to cover it up (unless you hobble yourself intentionally).
As a musician myself I can assure you that the high stakes releases for any musician are vinyl releases. They also happen to be the ones with which most musicians earn the most money.
Now technologically vinyl isn't superior (and anybody who claims it is is an idiot in the sense of the word), but technology isn't everything. A noisy casette tape can evoke the same (and sometimes more) feelings than the digital recording. A vinyl record with a big cover, an inlay with band info, that you specifically chose to put on the record player while reading the liner notes and examining the design is in a ritualistic sense a thousand times more gratifying than having spotify select a song for you without knowing why, in the background of the daily life. That is like the difference between a candle light bath and getting wet in a rainshower.
Now that doesn't mean people will be binary either 100% vinyl or 100% digital. Vinyl is for the special occasion or for DJ sets, digital is for everything else.
The parent comment basically argued vinyl is superior because when artists used vinyl the resulting music was creatively better (because of whatever process). Sure, but then you can't selectively ignore the great music that has been made with other recording technologies. I can point to a lot of good music recorded on tape or digital. Unless we are arguing that music back in the vinyl days was broadly better than now? (Different argument then...)
As for artistic choices, I totally agree that vinyl can be a valid choice! Then it's silly to say one thing is "better" than another.
But in terms of raw technology, I say it's just copium to claim vinyl is in any way superior to digital. Digital's recording capabilities are a superset of vinyl's. There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure.
As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing.
But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now.
I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.
Not really. Analog electronic instruments are based on non-linear feedbacks loops. Those are pretty much impossible to emulate digitally without emulating actual electric circuits and current flow.
(Yes, I know, irrelevant to the vinyl discussion.)
Especially if you get into synths. A digital sine wave oscillator is doing sin(time*frequency)*gain. An analogue one is designed to produce a close to perfect sine wave at a certain set point, but you make it able to be varied around that set point by replacing some of the components with adjustable ones in somewhat ad-hoc ways, and see what it sounds like. The frequency may be set by a 3-stage RC circuit, you replace all the Rs with vactrols and see what happens, now the impedance changes as well as the frequency and it might affect other parts of the circuit. You may one-point calibrate it to 1 volt per octave but it won't be linear.
Jim Lill's video on guitar amp tone is an interesting demonstration. Hear how close he gets to the original with an even simpler combination of EQ and distortion:
The analog part of a synth can be meaningful and sometimes it is. But very often it is really not or can be adequately (or more then adequately) emulated digitally.
As a noise musician I am also aware that a lot of the interesting behavior of some circuits only comes to light under extreme conditions. It is a long standing pet peeve of mine that equipment tests always only test the gear in vanilla conditions. But quite frankly vanilla conditions are exactly what 99.9% of the musicians will use the gear with
Any filter resonance or guitar distortion/overdrive is not a "vanilla condition", so you're absolutely wrong.
In fact, the extreme conditions is precisely the reason why normies even listen to music. Nobody would care for electric guitar if it wasn't overdriven.
Hoe do I know? I am working on a digital distortion pedal right now. If done right software emulation of guitar amplification chains is pretty good nowadays. Many touring musicians use Neural DSP Quad Cortex and Co nowadays.
I happen to also like the simplicity and robustness of just a stupid analog amp, but those aren't as special as the gearsnobs make them out to be.
Those nonlinearities can't really be modeled mathematically.
We very carefully tune these things to a narrow range of stable parameters so that they sound more "digital", but really it's the unstable parameter ranges that make music interesting.
To me a statement as the one you made just showcases how little people know about the matter. Many just repeat talking points they have heard elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong. It is hard to e.g. accurately model a Wasp Voltage Controlled Lowpass Filter so it sounds as good as the real thing. But it is not even remotely impossible. There are much, much harder problems in electrical engineering that have been solved decades ago.
Old-school DJing! Imagine carefully positioning the laser on a CD...
But you could maybe argue that there are advantages to dirt (at least a hypothetical dirt which can be used as a musical medium somehow) which you lose by going to CD or vinyl. If this hypothetical dirt managed to be constraining in such a way that it produces kinds of musical works which would not have been produced for CD, is that not an advantage?
Artistic expression is not technology. Vinyl is strictly inferior as technology. That doesn't imply that it cannot have any advantages at all, but that wasn't the point being made.
Technology is sometimes used by artists to express themselves. Sometimes that means lo-fi recordings of your music on a shit tape recorder when better tools ate around. Sometimes it means pressing vinyls.
It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
> It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
Interestingly, not always getting "worse".
A large portion of vinyl surface noise comes from static rather than groove wear.
So you can zap it with a little petzo-electric gun and it goes away again. At least for a little while.
In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)
Candles/Vinyl can be superior if you clarify the metric you're optimizing for.
The advantages of vinyl are basically making up for lack of self-discipline in humans. (I much prefer vinyl for that precise reason!)
a) Since putting it on becomes more of a ritual - handling the album carefully, brushing off lint, placing the needle &c - I find I make more of an effort to actually _listen_ to the music I put on. I could listen as intently to Spotify or Tidal, too - but, alas, I most often don't.
b) Seeing as you'll get some 20-odd minutes of music before having to make another choice - be it playing the other side or another album entirely - it enforces having to decide on what you'd like to listen to, rather than just letting your streaming service of choice play things it thinks you may like. (That being said, streaming services are a great way to explore new music!)
c) Given the economics of streaming, buying physical media helps both the record stores - a good one is like an excellent library, in which the librarians give you all sorts of curated recommendations for things you may like, in addition to being great social meeting places with like-minded folk - and performing artists alive; I've no idea how many hours I would have to listen to an artist on Spotify before the payout is equal to their takeout from a single vinyl sale...
d) Besides, it is cosy.
That being said, you could easily DSP CDs or streaming to sound like vinyl if that's your idea of fun - just about any playback format is superior sonically to vinyl. However, to many, it is the whole ritual of putting on a record which basically makes it worth the sonic tradeoffs... (Call me a luddite if you like!)
I listen to most of my music on phones or computers and when I do, I like to pick out a track at a time or put together a playlist or just shuffle the whole damn thing.
When I purchase or put on a record, it's because I think the album is a cohesive work and I want to listen to it as a piece; the constrained format created the concept of an album, and using it enforces listening to the music as an album.
I don't see how this is different between a record and a CD.
Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.
Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.
I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too ...'
I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.
Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.
Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.
Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.
Heck, it used to be all the rage to get a three or five CD changer and shuffle the whole thing, comfortable unpredictability, forty or fifty songs you like but never knowing which is next.
You could likewise just listen to an album on your phone, in order, but it's too easy to let your distraction kick in and switch it halfway through.
It saddens me a little that, in spite of all the technology, actual Hi-Fi listening seems to have become less accessible or prevalent. I'm still not sure how much this is really for the commonly stated reason of convenience, and how much that is really cope and denial of a bigger socio-economic decline. I.e. it simply isn't as realistic for regular people to have a Hi-Fi listening space...
For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.
I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.
That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.
Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.
Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...
There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.
So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.
But I also hear lots of people complain they don't have the living space to dedicate to a Hi-Fi nor the time to use it if they did. To me, that is a sort of erosion of quality of life compared to what the middle class used to be able to enjoy.
But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.
And then once CD burners reached my price point, it was almost nothing but mix CDs, the original albums left on a rack in case I needed to re-rip them.
But, ignoring mix tapes, I didn't really get into track-level shuffling until the MP3 era where I could shuffle a much bigger pile of tracks. I do remember that a Sony 5-disc carousel could shuffle tracks reasonably quickly. But when I used players with a 6 or 10 disc cassette, track shuffle would mean spending a lot of time listening to servo motors and occasionally disturbing clunks that evoked visions of shattered or gouged discs.
I never had one of those massive jukebox style carousels that was sort of a hybrid of the two and could quickly switch among scores or hundreds of discs. By the time I saw those as affordable, they already seemed obsolete. Instead, I was ripping my CDs to MP3 (eventually repeated to FLAC), and had a USB to S/PDIF soundcard to send audio back to my A/V receiver over optical fiber.
I think that a reasonable number of people had audio gear (boomboxes) that could play a CD and record it to tape at the same time (and also record the radio to tape).
I think that for a number of years a lot of folks used mix tapes to listen to their favourite tracks from a CD (or a number of CDs).
I believe that hi-fi is not less accessible or prevalent than in past years/decades, it's just that most people don't care (and never have).
Rather less-succinctly: I never got into vinyl and have never owned a turntable that wasn't built down to a price. I do still have my shelves of CDs, and it keeps slowly expanding. I usually listen to Spotify because it is convenient and portable and -- these days -- lossless.
But my sister and her old man have put together a quite decent stereo system with a mix of vintage and modern gear in recent years, and also started a a rather serious vinyl collection. While there's certainly no romance there on my end, it's a lovely and deeply-involving experience to hang out with them in their tiny little city-dweller living room and spin records into the wee hours; sometimes for just one track, and sometimes for entire albums.
I definitely prefer the way my own stereo, which I've built over the course of decades, sounds. It's detailed and big and it does all the things; it is by all technical measures very superior. But we have a lot more fun listening to vinyl at their place than we have playing CDs and Spotify at my place. The process -- and indeed, the inconvenience -- of playing vinyl makes it all much more visceral.
But, another example: when I was growing up (dating myself here), cassette tapes were superior to CDs in the only way that mattered (to me): they didn't skip in my portable music player (walkman) when I took them running.
Or are you suggesting that I buy the record, a blank CD, and all of the high quality recording playback equipment I need to write it to that CD?
well actually...
RAM prices are such an infinitesimally small component cost of digital audio equipment that I can’t take you seriously here.
I imagine any large about of RAM in audio equipment would strictly be for devices/functions that buffer large amounts of data as opposed to just decoding it.
An old Akai S1000 sampler I had a long time ago had slots for memory modules (some weird proprietary slot IIRC), but that was a musical instrument, not really a player of any kind.
I had candles at my dinner table last Thursday, and am likely to do so date night tonight... but the bulbs I turn off to give the candles reign are LED...
Many decades ago, those who bought vinyl and desired adequate audio quality never listened to vinyl discs, but they copied them immediately to magnetic tapes and always listened only to the tapes, keeping the vinyl discs only as a master source, to avoid wearing them out.
You can get rid of a surprising amount of surface noise with a static gun and a line contact stylus (where shape is close to that of a cutting head so you get the biggest contact patch).
I think most people only copied to cassette if they want to use a Walkman, play it in the car or give a copy to a friend. It generally wasn’t for sound quality.
I would stand by recording to reel to reel tape for quality being even less common recording to cassette tape.
Quality domestic reel to reel decks were just not that widely owned here. Maybe it was different where you lived.
If your wired headphones are only lasting a couple months, then likely you're buying at a price point where quality suffers.
Agree with the tangle of wire, though.
All Etys have a peculiar love/hate neutral sound profile, so you should try them before committing to them. I exclusively listen to podcasts, so they're a perfect match.
Yeah, paying a tad bit more for earphones with replaceable cables pays dividends. A cable doesn't cost much, and you also get much better sound quality (which has to count, right? Since BT sound quality often comes as an argument).
You accustom to the wrap-unwrap motion and then that's it.
I am personally a fan of wired headphones with USB-C connectors. I am only ever going to use it with my phone, laptop, or desktop anyways - and all of they have at least one USB-C port.
In theory it could also be the best option for audio quality: if you move the DAC all the way to the headphone itself you minimize the length of the analog chain, which should also reduce the possibility for it to pick up any kind of noise or interference. Additionally, the DAC can be perfectly tuned to compensate for any imperfections in the headset itself, which should result in a better audio output than a random 3.5mm headphone paired with a random external DAC.
The obvious downsides are that you lose any kind of influence on the audio signal itself by forcing you to use a specific DAC, that the integrated DAC is yet another component which can break and be basically impossible to replace, and that a 3.5mm plug is far less likely to break than a USB-C one.
On the absolutely high end you probably want headphone and DAC separate, but for a Teams call or some casual on-the-go Spotify a fully integrated mid-tier headset / headphone seems to be the better option to me.
Meh. If you want your headphones to last for ages, you could go just a bit higher end and get a pair with a replaceable cable. Then you can just swap the cable with the integrated DAC, regular 3.5 mm jack, or whatever.
I used to have a lightning cable for my Shure IEMs, worked great until the cable developed the usual problems around the connector, just like your regular analog cables. I then bought a BT adapter for the same headphones and never looked back. I've had them for 15-16 years now, still work as good as new. The BT dongle is something like 6 years old, and the battery still holds a good charge.
My adapter is a bit of a pain nowadays since it's the last thing I have that uses micro-USB for charging. I hear Shure has released newer adapters with USB C and no wires at all. But that's too expensive to replace something that still just works.
I don’t find wireless (AirPods) all that convenient, so when they inevitably die of battery illness I’d like a pair that won’t suffer the same fate.
The only real downside is lack of ANC, and the wires can transmit some mechanical noise if it rubs on your clothing. I just have a little lapel clip (from my old Etymotics) to stop them moving.
But i realize that it might be hard to have 3.5mm on phones due to insane amount of size optimizations on these sophisticated devices we kind of take for granted by now.
im not sure using them with a phone would be good in the long run, especially when you are moving around a lot more with the phone in your pocket. the usb-c connection isnt as tight as 3.5mm so its going to put a lot of strain on the usb-c port. if that goes on a phone youre in big trouble
Because the integrated battery adds an expiration date to a device that could otherwise last decades if maintained properly.
Same as Apple tightly coupling the iMac screen with the Mac's software support cycle even though nothing would stop them from just adding, say, a USB-C port that can act as video input.
"Only" $43 billion in revenue is more than 95% of corporations achieved.
Apple is pretending to be eco-friendly and using that as excuse to ship fewer chargers, for example. If they can optimize the same Mac's packaging to use paper that's folded in all kinds of fancy ways, they can add a tiny bit of functionality to an existing port. You can't tell me Apple isn't able to care about small details, because they absolutely do when they want and not only when it's about revenue.
The only port in common between a 2015 Intel Macbook Pro and a 2026 Macbook Neo is the 3.5mm headphone jack. But also, the only port in common between a 2015 Intel Macbook Pro and a 1991 Powerbook 100 is the 3.5mm headphone jack.
The 3.5mm jack is fine, there isn’t any need to replace it on the MacBook where you can afford to have both. On the iPhone it makes more sense to use the usb c for audio.
I keep the adapter with my wired headphones (which I bought many years ago), and I did not encounter any issue (falling, heavy, etc.), it's just a slightly longer wire and a couple of euros spent to buy it.
You can still buy such phones. You need to take the brand loyalty blinders off first.
I understand this is a personal preference, but I never understood the anger some people had over the removal when it's as easy as just using a small USB-C to 3.5mm audio jack converter to use wired headphones.
As someone who uses wired earphones exclusively and must use those USB-C adapters you suggest, it's not quite "just as easy" because there are several problems:
- it's an extra $10 dongle to buy and potentially lose. I've lost several of them over the years
- adds more mechanical stress to the USB-C jack. The office Apple USB-C 3.5mm adapter protrudes out from the phone and I've had several close calls with the wire getting snagged on a door knob which can damage the USB-C port. I've never been comfortable with this Rube-Goldberg dongle contraption that adds more risk to damaging a $1000 phone. It's a fear I never had with the built-in 3.5mm jack on my old iPhone 5. There are 3rd-party right-angle USB-C to 3.5mm on Amazon (including magnetic ones) but the ones I tried interfere with phone cases and they don't sound as good. (Apparently Apple uses a more premium DAC chip in their USB-C adapter.)
- can't simultaneously charge the phone while listening unless you buy a different USB-C adapter that has both 3.5mm input and a USB-C passthrough charging port. These are bulkier.
- it's an extra dongle that's easy to forget. I once got on a transatlantic flight and realized that I forgot my USB-C earphone adapter at home. I panicked and dreaded the idea of nothing to listen to for 8 hours but I was luckily saved by a friend that didn't need to use hers and let me borrow it. Why can't I just leave the USB-C dongle connected to the 3.5mm 100% of the time so there's nothing to forget?!? Because I often need to connect the earphones to things that don't need the adapter.
With all those drawbacks, I still use the USB-C adapters because I have to. But it has definitely made life more complicated.
Contrast that to the simplicity with devices that still have a 3.5mm phone - my daily Android phone, my Macbook Air - I can just plug any old headphones in and not have to go searching for the adapter.
And despite the fact that I also own two bluetooth headphones, my wired big-cans headphones have far superior sound quality to either of them. I know it's not a fair comparison because they were well over $100 compared to $10 for the others, but I'm still limited to what I can use them with - which in my case is absolutely everything except my Apple kit (laptop excepted).
And if you ever held e.g. Apple's adapter in your hand you'll know how incredibly flimsy its cable is, and how such adapters easily act as levers to mechanically strain the USB-C port. There's a reason headphone jacks are robust - they were actually designed for use with audio devices in mind.
In comparison the headphones I've been using have lasted me for over 10+ years with no issue, and any decent high quality set of cans makes the 3.5mm cable easily replaceable.
We know as a matter of fact that Android does NOT handle your audio properly when you transmit audio over USB-C then converter. It used to work fine with 3.5mm.
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/250602/how-to-di...
And you could run into weird issues like this
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/238773737/assis...
Which nobody needed to worry about.
The only other connection type I found to be even worse is microusb. I lost count over how many cables I had to change, some even after just a few months. On the other hand I neved had any problem with usb-c cables or peripherals.
The USB to Jack things are brittle and low quality. That's yet another stuff to not lose and carry around.
Jacks just work. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
Sony phones were some of the first high end water resistant phones. They continue to be water resistant and still have the headphone jack and microSD card slot.
Hope the soft skills of those involved are better when interacting in person.
This is it. I have a lot of wireless headphones and every time I need to use one, it isn't charged. It's very exhausting and I don't want to deal with that. So I use them as wired headphone if possible, or dump them in the discard pile if not.
For convenience and casual on the go listening, or to not annoy anybody, I'll use earbuds or light headphones.
If I really want to enjoy music I'll take the big ol' cans (circimaural open-back), lie back, and enjoy the music fully. Etc.
(And I'm extremely not an audiophile! But big roomy headphones are super comfy and sound super nice to me :).
If I'm on zoom calls all day I want something lightweight but with a boom microphone (massive Grrrr! To everybody joining meetings with airpods).
etc. I'm an extreme example but I have a few different boom-mic headsets in my home office for work, gaming headphones, running around headphones, and listening to music headphones. All of that at a teeny fraction of price people used to spend on basic entry level home hifi setup.
For people who join online meeting once in a blue moon, ehh, whatever. For people who are on online meetings hours a day, good headset with a boom mic seems like the price of entry - but I understand I'm in the minority on that one :-).
Seems people think I'd like wireless headphones and I have received many as gifts.
I give them a fair shot since it's a gift, but it's just too much hassle to have to keep charging them.
If I had a use case for headphones while walking around those might be useful, but in all cases if I'm wearing headphones I'm sitting down in front of the computer, so a wired headphone is more convenient.
However, some of the other devices in my home are absolute crap with bluetooth headphones, particularly my windows desktop and my steam deck.
Pairing has been a solved problem for decade now with Apple devices. I pair my AirPods Pro or Beats with one Apple device by pressing a button and they are automatically paired with my iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and AppleTV and switch seamlessly between them.
Bluetooth was never meant to be used as an audio connection? While the original standard didn’t support A2DP, it was a part of the standard in 2003?
All Apple headphones support standard BT protocols.
Exactly!! After losing an airpod into the depths of a Polaris seat and another one having to beg the guy behind me to find it on the floor I gave up my airpods for flights it was so annoying how often they fall out.
Particularly for spoken word, it's annoying and distracting.
Same here but I did not have a single phone that after a while did not develop a problem with quality of contact leading to problems with sound starting from mild and going to awful. It is better now after I started to use USB-C based headphones.
Wireless - way too much overhead for me to manage. The only wireless audio I really use is Cardo headset when riding my EUC
- cannot overstate lack of lag and simplicity. You plug in and it works, perfectly, every time, forever.
- easily switch devices. I use my headphone on my phone, tablet, laptop, Synthesizer, Groovebox etc without a blink. And my phone never stops playing music and connects to our car my wife just started the way bluetooth ones do :-)
- to me, it's like email. Icq, aim, msn messenger come and go, yet email is old and boring but survives.
There's absolutely a time and place for wireless headphones and I probably use them more at this point. But killing 3.5mm from phones has been a Massive annoyance.
Every pair of cheaper earphones or earbuds I’ve had fail have failed due to the cable.
We switched my oldest to a pair of BT headphones because he seems incapable of keeping track of the cord. It gets caught, he pulls, and something has to give. Longest lasting set he had in 2025 was BT.
I'm the same way as your oldest, if I'm up and moving around while wearing earbuds/IEMs I run the cable through my shirt.
The article prominently highlights mobile usage, in which case wireless headphones easily win on longevity.
I LOVED my Grado headphones but destroyed three pairs of them and was soldering my own ends on the cables over and over.
I’ve been using Bluetooth wireless headphones exclusively when I’m portable since 2006 (Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 represent), with only wired use at a desk and I’ve never looked back.
Cables do fail though, completely. They become unusable.
In my entire life time of using headphones/earbuds since school with the PSP, ALL wired options have failed after 1-2 years for purely mechanical cable reasons. Not a single wireless failed for electronic reasons. The did fail for me dropping them and stepping on them reasons, though.
I have a pair or Shure IEMs I bought as wired over a decade ago. I've converted them to a lighting cable when I bought my iphone 7, then switched to BT when that cable failed.
Sure, the IEMs are bigger than airpods or similar models, but I find it's a good compromise. I wouldn't go back to wired headphones while at work, and certainly not while on the go.
Does Sony sell a replacement, or do you have to go through a 3rd party? Is everything held in place with screws, or do you need to mess around with glue and whatnot?
Hopefully more Bluetooth headphone companies follow suit. Maybe we can even get a standardized battery.
Isn’t it the wire that failed, not the audio part of it? So why not do what I did? You put some JB weld across that bend in the wire, which is cheap and could probably be engineered to last a lot longer… now I have headphones that last a really long time. You could also get a better connector and simply put that on there, right?
What is a "Sony g shock" if you don't mind? I know Casio's G-Shock and Sony's Sports series... did you mix them by chance as I suppose or is there a Sony range I'm not aware of?
I also exaggerated the year a bit. After looking it up, I think this cd player came out in 2004!
I use wired at home, where I'm not cycling the connection very much.
Honestly though you can get the best of both worlds.
I impulse bought some over-the-ear headphones at the airport when I realized I had forgotten mine that do bluetooth, but can also use an audio cable when the battery dies.
When using wired the audio quality is much better.
Your soldering skill (and sense of adventure) would have to be far better than mine to even consider doing that for wireless earbuds.
You’ll need to solder it to the contacts inside the can, but that’s quite straightforward.
In case the internal cable that goes from one can to the other breaks, you can replace it with any bit of audio cable so you can use one that’s easy to solder.
The trick is to gently scrape the stranded wire with a blade for the solder to stick and to make a good connection.
Plus, the more high end ones come with repleceable cables.
Sadly have to disagree. I use Beyerdynamic though where you can order parts to repair em yourself, which i already did.
[edit] cannot recommend their wireless stuff produced in China, the worst i ever had. The big corded cans are still manufactured in Germany.
I just wonder if wired fans just never skip forward a song, or adjust the volume. Or even use active noise canceling.
However, the noise cancelling gap is real. I'd kill for wired IEMs with an inline battery + buttons, and noise cancelling mic & circuit in the earpieces.
Closest is the Sony cans, which have wired mode (ie: they have a tiny jack, so you can use them passively) but I don't think they cancel noise when using them that way
The utility has dropped tremendously though, now that headphone jacks have disappeared.
Would love to have a pair of "direct-USB-C" Etymotics.
I use wireless headphones and in fact never use this feature (I have it disabled). Too unreliable when there's a large screen with a big pause and skip button within reach.
This has been a thing in wired headphones since at least 2007 lol
But also, I don't think it's either/or for most people. I use both wired and wireless headphones all the time depending on the use case. Wired sounds far better and is more reliable, wireless is more mobile. Different use cases.
I can point to the shelf with my Sony wired ANC ear buds, which I bought years ago specifically for ANC during air travel, in the era when I would use my iPod and later an iPod Nano. The ones I have are the second pair, bought after the first was accidentally left on a plane. I think they were different product generations, a few years apart. These are so old, they are purely stereo headphones. Microphones for duplex audio hadn't become pervasive yet.
These stick in my ear with little silicon flanges and have a part that sits outside with the microphone. Then there is a small control module sitting at the junction of left and right ear wires, which holds a AAA battery and has a power switch and a pass-through audio button (which always seemed more gimmick than utility to me). In their active mode, they also don't demand much of the source device.
even some of the cheapest in-line remotes that only have a single button will let you change the track by double tapping it
if you dont have an in-line remote then theres also the option of using a key remapper app (probably not on iphone) to let you change track by long pressing the volume buttons
- sorry just kidding. I couldn‘t resist.
Sennheiser provides replacements should you need them. The effect they have on the sound is much bigger than you might think.
Not anymore for my old 380 pro. Had to settle for aftermarket versions that feel a little softer but also sound a bit different.
The leatherette one was useless within 2 years. Outside became slimey / sticky, the inside just shrunk.
The velour one works fine but feels different to original. I just ordered a mesh one to try too.
This is because they're mostly synthetic "leather", which doesn't last long. Everyone is probably familiar with how synthetic leather starts to flake off. Icky. If you get some pads made from real leather (usually lamb is the go-to choice) they'll last virtually forever. However since real leather is heaver and less porous, this changes the way they sound very noticably (makes them sound less open). If you use open/half-open headphones anyways, the difference won't be too extreme: just moves the sound closer to closed headphones. On closed headphones leather cups make it feel something is covering/plugging my ears. Uncomfortable. Would not recommend.
Worse than how quickly fabric and synthetic leather degrades is arguably that those cups can hardly be cleaned and even when not that old get icky quickly, with dirt stuck in fabric and fine cracks.
I have the same problem with vulcanized coatings that go sticky after several years (looking at you, 3D Connexion SpaceMouse, Saitek X52, etc).
Until my cat finds them.
Any serious set of wired headphones better have replaceable wires because apparently they are delicious
I can use them while charging my phone or working out. Can play a video while cooking and moving around the kitchen. Or while watching TV/playing a game in the TV where a cable can’t reach.
However when static I used wired. That’s mostly when on the computer, but like many people here I am assuming that’s a good part of the day.
Wired headphones at least if they fall out are still connected to a rope to get them back!
I've had a pair of Sony MD-7506s ever since I assisted in an analog recording studio, years ago. 7506s were the standard then, not sure about now. I am on my 5th set of cushion replacements.
A few years ago I bought a high-ish quality bluetooth adapter I can put in my pocket and walk around. The one I bought is the Boltune BT-BA001. Looks like they are only $30 on eBay now, but there may be better ones out there. That little box is probably my most used piece of inexpensive electronics.
"Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don’t Have a Record Player, New Study Shows":
* https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-pla...
Seems that people are buying records not to listen to, but to use an 'art object', or other type of artefact to publicly show their like and support of the artist(s) in question.
So I guess it actually makes sense.
That’s an implementation problem, not a technology problem. iPhone with AirPods here - your scenario just does not happen. There’s even an option for “yes be stupid and connect to my car even when I’m in the middle of a phone call” if you really want to use it…
I have two iPhones and a MBP. I have to keep Bluetooth disabled on the MacBook otherwise it randomly triggers while I'm between podcasts or whatever and squeeze the AirPods to resume, instead it launches Apple Music, or some browser tab starts playing audio.
This is far from solved if you have more than one Apple device.
There is no option for me to say: never use AirPods for anything but podcasts, and absolutely never automatically select them as an audio source for zoom/teams. AirPods microphones just don't work for my vocal range, they sound horrible and underwater. The microphone on my MBP works great, the mic on my iPhones works great.
AirPods are fine if you only ever use one device at a time. If you use more than one at the same time, it becomes extremely annoying.
Let's not even get into the annoying ways which it becomes hard to manage when you have multiple AirPods, multiple iPhones, and multiple MacBooks.
It happens to us all of the time.
My partner is on a conference call, I hop in the car to go run an errand. Suddenly I'm on a conference call.
My partner is in the kitchen listening to a podcast, I hop in our other car and suddenly I'm listening to a podcast.
My partner is sitting in the car having a driveway moment, I arrive home with the other car and now I'm having her driveway moment.
My partner is on a conference call at her desk and picks up her phone to respond to a message and then you hear "shit shit shit, hold on a moment!" and then frantic typing and clicking.
I do not miss spending 30 seconds untangling my headphones every time I used them nor do I miss trying to find clever ways to wind my headphones back up so as to minimize the likelihood of them becoming tangled. If someone solved this problem well I would use them, but putting my airpods on a charger once a week is a much lesser inconvenience IMHO.
I’ve always found it more convenient to keep the headphones plugged in when I’m not using them then when I am. The cord is not going to get tangled when it’s not attached to my body, and aren’t going to unplug themselves sitting on a shelf. Different strokes though.
Cables can wear out. You can get a wire break.
It's so bad you'd almost wish for a brand new wireless connectivity or wireless audio standard, or even resort to some proprietary 2.4 GHz nonsense, because it's genuinely so horrid. You could have the best most expensive headphones in the world, but because of Bluetooth and its ancient profiles and mic support it's gonna have baseline absolute garbage mic quality no matter what.
* They are harder to lose, but the ones with non-detachable cords need repairing the cord if it rips, which happens frequently. Never happened with BT headsets I own.
* For BT headphones with detachable cord I agree, that BT channel reduces quality slightly, compared to cord on the same device. It's not as bad as vinyl/tape, though. You have a chance to notice it on lossless. but not regular MP3s.
* Wired don't need to pair, but need your awareness of the current relation between the cord and your body and surroundings, otherwise you will be constantly re-attaching them, or ripping cords. They don't glitch or lag, but pick static and RF.
Wireless is really convenient, if you can afford headphones that last a full day, or a pair of them to switch between and don't have many sources of sound to play to the same headset, even at different times. There are own standards that skip BT and use analog RF to skip the lag and drops (with a dongle), but they too have the issue with RF interference. You either can have digital with lag and rare drops, or instantaneous analog with frequent noise without drops.
I've experienced the opposite. The microwave will knock out my bluetooth completely, but the wired headphones are solid but in a decade of using both wired and wireless headphones I've never heard anything weird or staticy through the wired ones. My wired headphones were the Shure SE215, and now after a decade of using those they broke, so I have the Kiwi Ears Belle.
It's illegal not to,
- there are TRS (3 rings) and TRRS (4 rings) connectors
- TRRS has integrated mic, also ofen implements playback control via buttons
- Apple headphones volume controls won't work on non-apple devices, because they implement a proprietary protocol based in an ultrasonic chirp authentication chip[1]
- 1more headphones seem to have implemented this auth protocol, but it does not work reliably
- Headphone remotes on apple devices have tap codes (in my opinion a huge benefit), that can be used to
play/pause (.)
next chapter / track (..)
prev(...)
fast forward (._)
rewind (.._)
even navigate menus (_, then + or -)
---- legend ----
.=click
_=hold
+-=vol
- Apples USB-C 3.5 Adapters work with Android and iPhones and all headphones, Android does only implement play/pause and volume
- headphones remotes are fundamentally broken on Android because Google reserves longpress (button hold) for voiceover
- there are also balanced (often 4.4mm) outputs for much higher quality, often used in high res daps from fiio or shanling, etc
my wired earbuds only have 1 button on the in-line remote but the app can detect the button being pressed whether its a single, double tap or long press, and you can just assign whatever you want to them
theres also the issue of whether the wireless protocols that are in use now will still be supported in 50 years. removing the headphone jack from phones was mostly just a money grab to force people to buy wireless headsets so i wouldnt be surprised to see other tactics in the future where support is dropped for older versions of bluetooth, or whatever gives them a slight uptick in sales
Apple themselves know this. Every MacBook, no matter how few ports it has and how “non-pro” it is, ships with a headphone jack.
For mobile devices I can understand it and do use it.
Getting rid of it in favor of Bluetooth-only audio connectivity is creating a problem to sell you a (more expensive, less reliable, less time-tested) solution.
The phones will always have to have DACs in them, to drive their speakers if nothing else. Denying customers a physical connection to them is just a dick move.
I can also freely move around the house while listening to music or any podcast. Carrying my laptop around would hardly be convenient.
I do have a pair of wired headphones which I rarely use. My laptop has ended up on the floor twice due to me standing and forgetting about the cable. I almost broke the plug another time when I stood up and they were still plugged to the desktop. As someone who's grown up with the comfort of wireless headphones, using wired headphones is like wearing headphones with an anchor.
Honestly, I hate dealing with cables, even more having cables wrapped around me. I can't imagine being out on the street and having cables wrapped around me, connected to the phone in my bag or pocket, while trying to move around or use my arms in the usual way.
It won't once they're five years old!
I'm not against battery powered headphones, but I won't even take a second look at them if they don't have a battery type that is likely to be available in a decade or two, and isn't inconveniently glued shut. That leaves me very few options.
When I find a pair of cans I like I'd like to keep them. The idea that my tools have planned their obsolensce in advance seems completely ridicolous to me. I would never buy a nice guitar if it had a lifespan shorter than my own, for example.
They have. Apple has AirPlay and MFi which includes their own proprietary set of codecs and protocols for media streaming over a link similar to but not actually Bluetooth. Quite a few devices support it, such as my hearing aids.
Also, while the new Bluetooth LE Audio shares the Bluetooth name, it's a completely new protocol for most intents and purposes; for example audio can be streamed one-way without pairing first, and it's surprisingly low latency (20 ms or so).
2) In-ears are comfortable to lie in bed with. Cables are unsafe here (compare with 'lost of earplug' argument).
3) Batteries need to be user serviceable (see iFixit), but so should cables be. See my point #1.
4) Not all Bluetooth protocols are equal, and pairing is a matter of a couple of seconds just like taking the headset or attaching the cable.
5) You can also make a wired headset wireless if the cable is modular. Small 3.5 mm to 3.5mm or USB and then usb2bt with a battery.
6) All headsets require maintenence in form of cleaning or replacing the (fake) leather.
7) Bluetooth has security issues. Tracking, for example, but also the stack is a security nightmare. You generally cannot physically replace the Bluetooth chip on client or peripheral, as they're usually baked in the hardware (e.g. in WLAN chipset of smartphone, tablet, laptop). Sometimes it is possible to use a modular device such as USB-C/USB-A. Then you can replace or add a stack.
Each has their pros and cons.
There is digital compression, but the original media you'll play will already be compressed, and good-enough digital compression is not noticeable unless you're using a good DAC with a good pair of studio headphones.
If you're in professional audio production, get a decent DAC and something like the M50x headphones, if you want to play stuff off your phone, just use a wireless option.
Fortunately USB-C audio adapters are cheap and for headphones where the cable isn't permanently attached you can usually even get a replacement cable that plugs directly into the USB-C port of your phone.
"The suit is back," it begins. Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.
I suppose there’s probably music torrent sites out there, but haven’t heard of anyone pirating music in many years as I’m too old now.
I love this about Apple and give them as much of my business I can to show that there is still a healthy market outside streaming. (7digital is another good source, although more expensive than Apple. They offer FLAC and 320kbps.)
Makes me wish e-book stores would get onboard…
The project was great to work with, Daniel Stenberg (also the curl maintainer) was really good at helping newcomers like me participate. That may be a big part of why the project is still around 20 years later.
> Sales are through the roof in recent months.
OK, I'll follow the link here. It goes to an article titled "Wired Headphones Growth Is a Throwback to 2016"[1], already a far cry from "through the roof".
From that article we have this:
> After 5 years of sales declines, which culminated in a $42M drop in 2024, wired headphones rebounded in 2025, growing 3% (about $15M).
OK, great. So wired headphones are a little bit trendy after years of decline. And of course they have some real advantages as many people here are testifying.
But c'mon, "sales are exploding", "sales are through the roof". They're not through the roof, they did a little bounce when they hit the floor. OK, to be fair it also says "the trend really gained momentum in the second half of 2025, with sales surging 10% between July and December", so maybe it's getting some momentum, but let's not get so far ahead of ourselves.
[1] https://www.circana.com/post/wired-headphones-growth-is-a-th...
And there's potential for upsell in-store and on the website.
If people are defecting to wired from EarPods, it makes sense to try and position themselves in thought next to wired ones as will
This assumes that people are switching from wireless to wired headphones organically, and the main assertion of the article (wired headphones are popular again) isn’t actually manufactured.
Although it’s possible Apple influenced the article, it makes no sense for them to push the “wired over wireless” narrative. AirPods are a $25B/year business with very high profit margins. EarPods are a tiny fraction of that, and it’s not worth manufacturing a narrative that undermines their successful AirPods business even for the chance of upselling.
RIP I'm sure it was a noble device. My Pixel 3a is currently my wireless router for very German reasons. I worry this will kill off the still-decent battery life, as has happened with my OG Pixel.
I have since allied myself with what I personally consider the devil of consumer electronics just to stay on this boat.
Can't lie flat due to camera bulge. No headphone jack. Fingerprint sensor on the front that screen protectors interfere with. No sim slot. Ai bullshit triggers if i keep my thumb to close to where you touch to switch apps. Ai bullshit also replaces the old power menu, which now requires a combo button press.
Such a let down.
Now I'm down to my Shure IEMs (via an Apple lighting-to-3.5mm dongle) and a borrowed pair of old Galaxy buds - wanted to give wireless buds a try, since it's been so long. I don't like them.
1: emitting an earsplitting screech as they did so - the cable must have gone.
You can with wireless charging!
Actually, they're so good, they're still making and selling the exact same model.
This article notes 2025 saw a 3% increase of 15m. That means total sales are 0.5b, or 2.5% of Apple's airpods product.
In other words: tiny market with a growth in line with inflation after years of decline? Let's call that 'exploding sales' and farm some clicks.
Yes perhaps there is some newfound interest, but since bluetooth headsets took off they keep getting cheaper to buy, easier to pair and connect, longer lasting batteries, easier to find, smaller to pocket, more varied, more comfortable to wear, and with better noise-cancelling. Plus every year fewer devices carry the headphone jack.
It's on the way out, though it'll be a slow death. I have a pair of wired headphones, I prefer them on corporate laptops for meetings because corporate laptops suck with pairing. But that's about it.
At the very most, it's on its way out in the same way normal computers are on their way out for non-IT professionals. There are situations where wired is a must, not a preference (studios being the most obvious).
Aside from that, wired offers the highest sound quality possible, plug-and-play, and all at a lower price. Wireless headphones don't appear to even be trying to catch up.
The same applies to pro gamers. Latency and empty batteries are a big no-no.
I've noticed that hyperbole is increasingly getting frontpaged as of these past 6-10 months.
The quote above makes absolutely zero sense to me, it's like ChatGPT 0.3a decided to write something about Bluetooth.
I have multiple bluetooth headsets that I use with multiple devices. I have collected a series of tricks that I use when I can't get bluetooth to operate the way I want it to: turning bluetooth on/off, restarting the bluetooth device. "Forget the network" is not one of those tricks, but I wouldn't be surprised if others have learned to use it.
TikTok is a big reason wired headphones are popular. AirPod microphone quality is spotty and improving the quality is non-deterministic. With wired earpods, people put the mic next to their mouth and get above-average audio quality.
Like the article says, wired headphones have also become a fashion statement akin to vinyl culture.
It's just much harder to get good sound quality when the mikes are by your ear rather than on a wire near your mouth
Not to mention that it completely removes the risk of running low on headphone battery mid-call
They also project a clear message of “don’t bother me” when worn in public.
“ wired headphones rebounded in 2025, growing 3% (about $15M).”
So now a 3% growth in sales is “exploding” and “through the roof”? No, I don’t think so…
I'm not sure what the agenda would be in this case and maybe there is no agenda, but it's something to be aware of. It could be simply one of their contributors has a bone to pick with manufacturers over the lack of reliability in Bluetooth audio technology.
Real-time Gell-Mann amnesia.
I went looking for the state of the art in headphones and bought (1) a set of AirPod Pros and (2) a recent Sony headset.
My feelings about the AirPods are terribly mixed.
10 years ago I think the best reason to spend $250 instead of $25 on a set of Bluetooth headphones was that the $250 device would pair properly with multiple devices whereas it might take you 15 minutes of screwing around to unpair and repair the $25 headphones every time you need them. But hey they are so cheap maybe you can pack one for each device you have and not worry about it.
Today it is the other way around, somehow $25 headphones "just work" with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Steam Deck, whatever. After I disabled the microphone and switched to the microphone on my camera, the AirPods got reliable with Windows. Inside Apple's ecosystem it tries really hard and almost works, yet the $25 headphones "just work" and don't seem to be trying so hard. I don't get messages warning me that somebody else's $25 headphones are following me around but my iPhone tells me that about my AirPods all the time but I think it is a KPI for somebody in Cupertino that I see the word "AirPods" as much as possible.
Now the sound quality of the AirPods is just great, I'll grant that, but I'm not going to be one of those annoying youngsters who is as hard as hearing as the oldest oldsters because I have some genetic polymorphism that makes me produce copious amount of earwax that eject the AirPods from my ears if I move too much. My doc says one of these days my ears are going to plug up and I shouldn't get so excited about it.
If you still want to make the old headphones work these welders are a godsend, and with some small amount of diy work of cleaning, sanding and buffing you can easily hide these welds.
I personally like to leave them though since they accent that something that was once broken is whole again, and that it has a long history!
Sony experia, Asus zenphone, Motorola Moto G, and a few others
They're rare nowadays, but they're inherently superior when it comes to audio just working
Wireless headphones take up much less space. I can put them in my pocket trivially.
Wireless headphones can tell me where they are and if I've left them behind.
Wireless headphones don't have a piece of plastic that dangles on my neck, shoulders, and face. As someone with sensory issues, this is genuinely important.
I've never had to spend five minutes untangling the cords for my wireless headphones.
I've never accidentally snagged the cable on my wireless headphones, causing them to snap off.
I can put my phone in a waterproof case in my backpack and protect it while walking. I don't have to do cable management to route the wire.
It's fine to prefer the wired headphones. I fully endorse that for you. Maybe drop the hyperbole about how wired headphones are strictly better?
And I hate it: latency, glitches, randomly just deciding not to connect anymore, deciding to connect in the lower-quality headset mode when I want to listen to music, and refusing to switch to the high-quality mode, battery running out at inconvenient times, the cat knocking them off my nightstand and under the bed where I cant reach them. So many reasons to be annoyed by them!
But I hardly ever take out my wired headphones anymore, and I'm not sure why. Back when I got my first phone without a 3.5mm jack, I just kept a little USB-C adapter in the little pouch/case that held my wired IEMs, and it was fine. But at some point I bought a new phone, and there was a deal on cheap (or free?) wireless earbuds with it, and I really just stopped using wired headphones for the most part since then, even though the wireless ones really annoy me for so many reasons.
(I actually don’t like 3.5mm jacks as much as some people do, though, as my experience has been the ports get janky over time if they’re under any strain at all, which they will be on a mobile device and which is always a back-of-my-mind source of stress when using them, but quarter-inch jacks are awesome)
Wireless can't get caught on doorknobs or other protrusions.
I don't have to plug them in. I put them in my ears and they work.
They automatically work with multiple devices. I put them in and make a phone call. I put them in and take a video meeting on my computer.
There certainly are advantages to wired headphones and more power to you if you prefer those tradeoffs. But it's bizarre to call wireless "strictly inferior." It should not be difficult to find at least one thing about them that someone might find to be superior.
Would you share more? I've never had an issue with a USB-C cable. Helps to buy well constructed ones with legit specs.
And when usb-c phones disconnect just a little, usually the phone will pause the music completely and disconnect, whereas the aux headphones will just keep playing. So if the connection isn't perfect, the usb-c cable becomes unlistenable because I can't walk 20 steps without it pausing.
edit: I've tried many cables and dongles, so if you don't have this problem, it might be just that I move around more? Biggest problem for me is commutes and walking around.
Compared to 3.5mm where the frustrations I remember were usually limited to sometimes getting a bit of a crackle or one of the audio channels dropping out and worst case scenario you just unplugged it and put it back in and it usually worked. With USBC you have to wait to see.
I'm not well versed in the world of port design, but what comes to mind is a little shallow magnetic nub with a couple of contacts on it. Easy to clean, impossible to break by accidental torquing, not deep enough to get stuff stuck in it.
The cool thing is that whatever the new design is, making adapters for 1.44mm to the new thing is dirt cheap since it's still just an analog connection.
Texas Instruments explains the scheme in a document, "tidub66.pdf."
I know USB-C connectors aren't quite what you had in mind, but they are smaller and more rugged than the 3.5mm connector (in my opinion).
Downside is it is not widely supported, but it is possible. The host device needs to support a way to detect the analog USB-C audio cable (recognized through four shorted pins) and then to split off the analog audio signals before they hit the internal USB transceiver chip.
Probably need to start shopping again soon cause updates stop in June.
Right now, since I buy audio files anyways, I've mostly been relying on a tiny audio player that can also act as a Bluetooth receiver for my phone.
I've had to ally myself with a brand I've once sworn off just to get a flagship model Android with a headphone jack. Killing Reader is a greedy betrayal (they were pushing us onto Plus, the whole social web thing) but removing headphone jacks from Pixels is a cowardly betrayal! Eyeing you too there, Samsung. You and Google both have made it extremely difficult to maintain a modicum of principle in today's consumer landscape! You made me justify my purchase with a utilitarian "Better the jacked devil than the blue-toothed one".
(And before you ask, I only generally buy flagships because I upgrade my phone like, every five years, and in my experience flagships are just more bang for buck. YMMV tho.)
Anyway, honestly, wired is not perfect. Wired and wireless each have their inconveniences it's just that I'm more willing to put up with the inconveniences of wired. Wired connections have known failure modes, something which I really value in tech. I have a Sony WH-1000XM3 which can work both as wired and wireless and I love it for that.
Long live wired connections! Here's to a future with cheaper flagship models with a headphone jack!
It has nothing to do with fashion or retro vibes, as far as I can tell.
They’ve all lost too many AirPods through the years. AirPods just too easy to lose, and at their school, too easy to be stolen by someone else. And they’re expensive. Yes you can buy cheaper Bluetooth headsets but those often don’t sound as good and get lost just as easily.
So you’re either on a subscription basis relationship wih Bluetooth headsets, or you use wired headphones, which are actually harder to lose and less desirable to steal.
And then also everyone I know who was heavy into airpods has also over time moved off them because, the battery. Everyone uses over ears from Sony now. Like look at what the walkers in your neighborhood are doing, everyone has overears now with actual battery life that isn't going to be ewaste in 18 months.
Heavy usage on these is just killing the battery. It is worst case for battery health: people just draining these down in one session constantly. In like 1 year maybe 2 your battery life has sunk like a stone and apple wants $50 out of you. 10 years half a grand spend on $5 sound quality.
* Having to charge them is a PITA
* Having to pair them is a PITA
* Having more points of failure is a PITA
* Paying more is a PITA
On the other hand:
* Wires are fine
Different strokes I guess.
A wire sitting on a table does not suck. 2 people can gather around that table and still, the wire does not suck. As soon as 1 person picks up the wire and starts doing something with it....now an interaction with a wire sucks.
But that's not the wire's fault.
>But that's not the wire's fault.
So... "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden deceleration"?
My assertion is that an inanimate object becomes a problem when a human interacts with it.
Your attempted logical argument is that a law of nature is the same as an inanimate object.
I am not contesting that an inanimate object is the same as gravity.
I'm saying that humans make bad decisions with simple things and whine about inanimate objects and that's a very real first world problem.
Wires suck.
For example if I have my phone and laptop running, and I’m listening to something on my phone, I pause with my AirPods, and then I unpause with my AirPods, instead of what was playing on my phone resuming through my AirPods, a video that I’ll have forgotten about will instead play through my laptop speakers, and pressing pause on my AirPods will do nothing and I have to interrupt whatever I’m doing to pause on the laptop. Possible they’ve fixed this specific issue though since I’ve learned to not have anything that has media controls open on my laptop.
The cross platform control stuff is probably very hard and usually works though.
The equivalent PTIA for wired would be having to untangle them everytime you want to use them.
>* Having to pair them is a PITA
How many devices do you have that this is an issue? This is an issue that pops up a few times a year, at most.
>* Having more points of failure is a PITA
It's unclear which has more PoF. Wires can break, not to mention randomly catch on stuff and sending your phone flying.
I personally prefer wired headphones... they're always charged and ready, even if I only use them with my phone once in a while.
Incidentally the same goes for bluetooth mice.
with my bluetooth headphones, every time I use them in my house it's a hunt. First find my phone and disconnect them on it since thats what connected automatically. Then, go to the tv and disable bluetooth since that was the second thing it connected to. Then put the headphones in the case and back since they won't pair for some reason. Then go to settings in my PC. Realize my PC connected to my speakers, disconnect them, then connect to the headphones.
Someone then calls me on the phone, I pick up and their voice comes booming from the speakers.
Bluetooth would be infinitely better if it didn't connect automatically. Just press a button on the device you want to use. Instead it connects to everything but the thing I want to use.
Recently I bought some cheap $10 wired Sony earbuds. I was surprised they sound much better than my $150 bluetooth earbuds.
In the pro audio, wireless was never a thing with an exception of live shows where you’d might want to be free on stage but avoid stage monitors.
Notice that while Apple made everyone ditch the lovely 3.5”, on the MacBook Pros they’ve actually kept it and *improved* it.
As this is HN, I’ll focus on technical aspects I didn’t notice in the article.
- Active Noise reduction
While the article suggested the battery free magic of analog headsets. Flights are where the active noise reduction headsets shines. Active cancellation isn’t needed for studio environment but on the go it can certainly make your listening more pleasant.
- Hybrid devices There are several manufacturers with classical headset designs that also includes wired support with all modern features. This is a good balance in my opinion for benefiting from both worlds.
- Latency
Especially Bluetooth, our current consumer wireless is buffered and this latency is too much for creating music. Products such as GarageBand, Logic or FL Studio won’t be that useful for tracking with Bluetooth.
- Quality
Indeed, analog 3.5” audio is uncompressed vs Bluetooth. But it doesn’t mean the audio is superior for listening just because of that transition. Our modern devices are still mostly digital those days so there is DAC that takes those bits and converts them to analog (most of it today is done well as those chips are common) and the other step is the analog amplification. Audiophiles usually invest a lot in the headphones amplifier. Most android devices in the past were mediocre in that sense.
So while wired is a trend, the “dongle” of USB-C to convert the audio is still a major part of the quality we end with.
- Sharing is caring (my personal take)
The biggest frustration I feel with Bluetooth is that it’s now nearly impossible to use multiple headphones for listening. In the old days, you had a simple splitter and as long as both headsets were the same impedance, you can even have 4 people listening to the same content easily.
With Bluetooth, only Apple addresses this in a very limited manner with a lock in to specific models and up to 2 devices and no video calls or live audio support.
The Bose mobile app also allows me to use two pairs of Bose headphones on a single device, but still only 2 devices and AFAICT only for media consumption.
Of course, the company disappeared, and now in 2026, we have lesser tech than we had back in 2017.
If you're wondering "Well, how did a company disappear?!", feel free to take the most corpo/capitalist-dystopian guess.
If you guessed "They got bought out by Google - presumably for IP - with the founders joining Big G, and Google of course promptly shelved it and did absolutely diddly squat with it", congratulations, you win... frustration and disappointment, I suppose!
1 - https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-most-exciting-th...
Not "audiophiles" standard though from a sound engineer pov, it is very decent (especially compared to my other laptops)
There are some models but none really explore their possible advantages (battery, ux, single signal source).
I lost single wireless earpiece multiple times making the rest useless. This won't happen with wire. With wire its also so much easier and quicker to take them off they will just hang around your neck. There is reason why many workers in loud environments prefer earplugs wired together.
My impression is that apple hyped the airpods so well that people forgot about other possibilities. And when Google included cool headphones with cables people thought they have to cut them… that was when industry decided its dead segment.
I also have to say i haven't checked this for two years but there seem to be some new models now (under banner of neckband earbuds). So maybe there is something nicer now.
>"Bluetooth does not work," Kravitz said in a recent interview, and it's not just headphones, but Bluetooth connections in general. "It's ruining important moments. Imagine the amount of times that you're with someone on a date, you're trying to set a vibe, and then you have to forget the network. On a date!"
Gee, is that the kind of stuff that makes people want this, rather than actual usefulness related reasons?
I want it because I don't want yet another thing to have to charge, and because I'd want to be able to throw some cheap headphones in my backpack that I can use the one time in a month that I actually need them in combination with a phone (which of course isn't possible anymore today)
Also, why are ANC headphones today worse for gaming than in the year 2018 when they supported aptx that had less lag? Technology is going backwards?
This is a Circana Retail Tracking Service content-marketing piece. Like the x% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck is a LendingClub content-marketing piece. 3% being $15m indicates this is a $500m market. Airpods themselves are a $25 b revenue product.
Multipoint is also cool too. I like listening to music, taking a call, going to the toilet, and coming back to music all without doing anything.
If there's a silver lining to the last 15 years, it's that replaceable cables became a standard feature and that there are IEMs with direct USB C cables now. If/when Moondrop/KZ/Linsoul release IEMs that can be used like wireless earbuds with ANC, and can also connect and recharge via USB C, they can just take my money.
It happens so often I even wrote a script to switch to the MacBook internal speakers then back to the headphones.
I've used wired headphones before (and the Sony even has a wired option), but I didn't like how the cord was constantly getting the the way of my arms.
edit: Another big gripe is with the Bluetooth codec itself, and how the quality changes depending on if the mic is active.
I have a pair of IEM with the usb-c converter attached most of the time for use with phones.
Give Truthear Hexa a try.
I spend a lot of time at the gym or walking with headphones in and music, podcasts, or audiobooks on. It’s so much better not having any wires when you’re moving. I can’t imagine doing these actives anymore with wired headphones.
Battery life, pairing, charging, audio quality, and other complains are all non issues for me, but I’m also no audiophile. They work incredibly seamlessly inside the Apple ecosystem.
There are a couple of minor annoyances for sure, like the car grabbing my phone when it turns on, but that's not a huge deal. And the annoyance of having a cord dangle around while I'm walking the dog or doing dishes or whatever the hell I'm doing far outweighs it.
All of that said, if I wanted audio quality to sit and actively listen to music, I'd go wired no question. But I don't really care when 95% of my listening is audiobooks and podcasts.
I never stopped using wired headphones at home but also had BT ones on the go. When they started showing signs of age I got a cheap BT receiver instead of replacing them. It's not quite as practical but for many people it's something to consider, they work surprisingly well!
The advantage is you have a backup port.
I guess a lot of that is nostalgia. My laptop model no longer has a webcam cover or a physical network switch; connecting and disconnecting the trrs[2] cable reminds me of these.
But some of that is still practical needs. I have AirPods and Bose wireless headphones, both praised for reliable connections. Every now and then they take a bit longer to connect or the volume changes unpredictably, or they need to be charged, etc - when wired headphones just work.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_headphones#EarPods
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)#TRRS_s...
I don't think many people thought their expensive Airpods/Bose/Sony were not capable of handling lossless and may feel left out or missing something.
I haven't bought headphones in years, and my current set support it.
For phones, I think it's just the Sony and Asus and Chinese brands that support it. Pixels and Samsungs generally don't since they use Tensor/Exynos instead of Qualcomm/Snapdragon SoCs, and definitely not Apple.
Story is even more bleak on the headphones side, Sony prefers their own LDAC codec so they support that instead of AptX Lossless, a pattern shared by many Asian headphones manufactuers. Many western brands only support up to AptX HD and AAC because Apple/Samsung devices have the majority marketshare. Qualcomm's own site only shows 12 headphones that support AptX Lossless.
Now my opinion is LDAC is close enough to lossless that it's probably good enough for Sony and most people (the 1411kbps for uncompressed 16/44.1 CD quality generally compresses to under 900kbps which is below the 990kbps max of LDAC). Bose does have a headphone that supports AptX Lossless. It's just the Airpods that are far behind the competition.
When wireless headphones came out, I looked at my wired ones and asked the simple question: is a tangling cable worse than bluetoth pairing and having to keep yet another thing charged? My answer was no, so I kept using cheap wired ones.
A few years later, now that makes me look rich. Or something.
If your tastes in music are not mainstream (and mine definitely is not), mainstream headphones will ruin your music more than you realize - for years I just thought that was how recorded music is supposed to sound, and it wasn't very good. Trying a neutrally-tuned headphone can change your (musical) life. Unfortunately, very few wireless headphones are tuned that way.
Edit: Part of why I never looked into it sooner, I had heard so much about "audiophile snake oil" over the years, I thought that was all there was. That exists, but there plenty of headphones marketed to "audiophiles" that are legitimate.
I am hesitant to buy Apple accessories like these as I am having quality concerns. Specifically the macbook chargers I've encountered are far less rigid than Lenovo Thinkpad chargers (at least before they switched to USB-C). I never felt Apple did a particularly good job with cables and connectors when it comes to longevity.
It doesn't provide full volume output under Android, though.
Otherwise, the CS43131 DAC powers some great designs. I can't comment on their durability, though. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
Afaik that's one big reason why BT is such a mess. Many different use-cases are dictated by different protocols, many of which are outdated, and two paired devices can only use a protocol supported by both. So the headphone can't just reuse the same nice connection and add a mic, it has to start pretending like it's some Bluetooth 2.0 device from 2005 or something.
My main ones are Sony MDR-V6s which I've had for 10 years. They are the best headphones I've ever owned and they sound just as good today as they did a decade ago. They were originally made in 1985 and the wire never tangles.
The other are crappy $8 earbuds / mic combo that are maybe 7 years old and work just fine.
I have wireless earbuds that I occasionally use since the Pixel 9a has no 3.5mm jack. They are worse in every way that I care about. I have to babysit them to make sure they are charged.
Sure the wired earbuds get tangled sometimes but it's not a big deal to address that. I also think wired is an advantage for portable usage. For example, for running or doing any activity the wire ensures if they fall out of your ear you won't lose them. They also don't need a case so you can stuff them anywhere without a bulge.
Obviously with wired headphones, because tape players don’t do bluetooth.
I have a nice high-end set of Sennheisers that cost ~ $150, and they're much better than my old wired set (both in-ear, both noise isolating, similar prices).
The bluetooth ones win because they eliminate cable noise. I can actually jog with them. In quiet rooms, they're very comparable, except the bluetooth set has a built in EQ, which works around the fact that iOS / Android still inexplicably do not let you adjust treble and bass.
The bluetooth headset market has been stuck in this weird spot where fashion mostly dictates. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that fashion now dictates wired headsets.
Also, I enjoy not having another device to charge. I recently have been wearing a traditional Casio watch more often instead of my smartwatch.
The model I have, BT2, is "semi-wired", meaning that the Bluetooth and battery are common to the two earbuds, linked by a cable. And, outside the big heavy cables some big heavy headphones have, this one is the one that has held up best – I'm pretty sure I got it before Covid. They now have a newer model with no wires, which houses the BT and battery in some over-ear clips [0]. I have no experience with these. In any case, I expect other manufacturers to have similar options.
Before this, I would have to change the (old-school) wire on these IEMs seemingly every other year. But at least it was changeable, as opposed to other cheaper IEMs which would require to break out the soldering iron at best, or end up in the trash at worst if they were a glue fest.
[0] https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/accessories/rmce-tw2?va...
Being able to get my phone out of my pocket and not have to worry about the cable is worth all the tradeoffs. At my desk, I have studio monitors, which I prefer over any headphones. For video calls, I use just the right Airpod to prevent echos, and so I can still hear myself.
Then I moved to the Apple ecosystem including iPhone, Airpods, and MacOS. It Just Works(tm) 99% of the time. The last 1% is a little annoying, and almost always has to do with device switching.
I also haven't had a problem with third party devices for many years now. My car does wireless Carplay just fine, and before that worked nearly as well with Android Auto. Rental cars the past few years even work - although pairing them the first time is roughly as annoying as digging through my bag for USB cable I suppose.
I've lost more pairs of wired earbuds than I have Airpods so far. I thought for sure I'd lose Airpods once every few months due to how often I forget things, but for whatever reason I find them to be easier to keep track of - the case fits perfectly in the "key pocket" in jeans, and it's become third nature to pat that pocket whenever I leave just like I do for keys/phone/wallet.
Not dealing with the annoying cable is great. I get a phone call, and I just grab the earbuds out of the case from my pocket within 10 seconds and I'm good to go.
For at-home PC use it's a different story, although I don't really find myself using my wired high-end cans much anymore. It's either airpods for day to day Zoom calls, or full on high-end speaker setups if I actually want to listen to something or game. Even high end cans cannot hold a candle against moderately decent speakers. The difference is night and day.
A pair of BT headphones from 15 years ago, even if they worked (which in my experience, they don't), would use an outdated audio codec- no one in their right mind want to listen to an SBC now
The noise cancellation is also great. I’ll use them if it gets noisier than my closed headphones can block.
> and finally, to my taste, they are somehow gross to look at - like hearing aids from the 1950s.
I do not care in the slightest how they look. They’re small and work well.
> The product just seems like a manifestation of complexity for the sake of complexity.
As someone who actually uses them, I disagree on every level.
You can get the Seinhensser Momentum 4, wireless optional, but closed over-ear and still work without battery, for less than 200. Way better sound quality than the in-ears.
The downsides you list don't apply to me personally. I don't have to "worry" about charging them; I just charge them. I have never lost them, I keep them in the same spot. I also personally think they look better than wired, but that's a fashion thing.
I think it's fine to have a different preference, but I find it odd people can't even understand the appeal of them. I don't like wired, but I can understand why people have different preferences.
Today? Airpods Pro do the trick: the second- and third-generation models rival or exceed most wired options. And that makes sense: Apple's R&D spending and engineering capabilities for a product like Airpods dwarf the resources of traditional audio companies--the built-in DSP alone is a staggering achievement. So they ought to sound great, and they really do.
And that's before you even consider all the other capabilities, like taking calls, etc. My pocket amps and wired 'phones (Etymotic, Shure, B&O, a few others I'm forgetting) have been gathering dust since the Airpods Pro came to market. I do not miss de-tangling the cables.
Of course, it is possible to do better, but not easy or inexpensive. On my desks at home and at the office are dedicated headphone rigs: DACs, amps, and wired open-backed cans (Focal, HifiMan). Those set-ups sound great--although not nearly so great as my two-channel speaker systems. But that's what it takes to get appreciably better sound than Apple's Bluetooth sets, and forget about portability.
Wired headphones are dirt cheap.
So it seems to me like the problem isn't Bluetooth, it's shitty implementations of it.
And it's not just cheap devices. My TV is a fancy LG OLED. For the price I paid it should handle Bluetooth just fine.
It's a real shame. When Bluetooth works, it's awesome, but a lot of people have had their opinions tainted by bad devices.
I've had headphones where a slight change in the environment around me while walking would disconnect audio. Or IEMs not syncing properly the L and R channels.
Even in the best of cases using headphones with multiple devices is just terrible. Also syncing audio to picture rarely works as it should.
Yeah, charging is a bit annoying, but the added comfort is worth it to me and I can't tell that the audio quality is any different.
Yep, but this is a problem that is present everywhere. For example, electric cars are supposed to be simpler, because its one moving part. In reality, you get essentially vertical integration of all the components like battery management, motor controllers, infotainment, gauge cluster and the software that connects all of that, and when bugs are present you can't even get into your car.
Perhaps, but it kinda seems to me that there must be some inherent limitation of the standard which make it particular hard to create a high-quality experience?
The latency for instance - in my (somewhat limited) experience audio over BT does not sync perfectly with video.
The channels/codecs is/was so limited in bandwidth that until recently (few years back IIRC) headsets couldn't even send and receive decent quality audio at the same time. Even recent headsets like the Shokz Openrun Pro 2 has this limitation. (Which you could argue is an instance of "shitty implementation" since it was released after the availability of necessary tech (LE/LC3))
Anyway. Somewhat ironically, I use a wired set of headphones for this. It's not just the speakers that are better. I often get people remarking how much better the audio is on their end too... i.e. the cheap inline microphone.
I absolutely don’t miss wired headphones. The idea that wireless headphones aren’t superior is insane to me. I think the one thing is battery degradation, but honestly, buying a new pair every 5 years is well worth the convenience of no cables in my mind. Especially headphones that switch well between devices are a big QoL upgrade.
I do wish all wireless headphones had a little jack for wired playback though, for one reason: instrument playback. Latency is absolutely unacceptable there; and it’s a shame I can’t plug my AirPods in. But I’m not surprised or angry at their omission; but on over-ear phones, it’s inexcusable.
I've very thankful that we are coming back to wired headphones.
I use my wired Sundara (which have dropped in price greatly since I got them years ago!) at my desk with DAC/AMP all the time, of course, and have a very nice set of Etymotic IEMs with a USB-C dongle permanently attached (once I stopped using it for my PC*). For use with my phone I haven’t actually reached for those Etys over my AirPods Pro 2 in years as the latter are significantly more convenient. They also work fine with Windows 11 (which supports AAC over Bluetooth, as can Linux IIRC) if I want to use them there for whatever reason. Maybe I’m blessed in that I don’t require my phone to be a critical listening device?
* If you have hissing/interference/etc when plugging headphones into your PC, the Apple USB-C dongle is very good and only 9 USD.
I charged my wireless headphone for 5 mins and took the call and it went out of juice mid way through the call. I had to run to find a free conference room in the office which was present since it was friday.
I also often connect my wireless headphone through the weekend and not know that it is still connected since friday with my work mac. Wired solves all of this.
Thanks to this article, I just ordered a Apple Earpods USB-C 5 mins ago in Blinkit. It is going to be delivered in another 5-10mins. Good bye wireless. I will use it for work with my Mac and my personal Samsung phone.
Edit after 4 mins: Earpods Delivered!
Barely any devices support being paired with more than one central. So you have to tediously disconnect with the first device in some shitty menu (e.g. on Android the UI is not at all clear), then maybe put it into pairing mode (again usually though some terrible UI because manufacturers think pairing is a rare operation) and then finally pair it on the other device.
Absolutely ridiculous. Oh and what's the Bluetooth equivalent of a headphone splitter? Auracast? It's taken decades to get that and basically nothing supports it.
I do use Bluetooth things and I think the sound quality and reliability can be very good (if you're lucky), but the connection process is miles worse than plugging in a wire.
I find using all these cables when I am on the go inconvenient, and I cannot imagine going back there. Especially with earbuds, I have probably changed over 10 or sth over the years due to cables failing (but I hate earbuds now anyway regardless). On the other hand, eg when gaming I definitely notice latency issues, especially if I compare them with wired, so I prefer to use them wired.
With your popular wireless headphones, you're really paying for the computer with ANC (and branding, packaging, depending on which version of the series the latest model is on).
The wired IEMs don't have an ANC but I realised I don't need it as often as I thought. I'm certainly going to look for Wired over-the-ear ANC cans next, but honestly I'm not sure if I need them.
Wired headphones could be one part of the solution. They're just far more reliable (if they don't break, which they will). But if the reliability of video calls can be improved so that it's literally as reliable as talking to someone next to you in a quiet room, I bet lots of people would pay for it. There is so much latent frustration about unreliable calls, even with the best setup, even in NASA, in DoD, corporations, zoom and other platforms fail to perform reliably in so many cases.
Microsoft would be ruined, haha. Over the past week, I had about a 30% chance of the call not working and a a 80% chance of the screenshare not working
If you or anyone's seriously interested in pursuing it, feel free to reach out to the email address in my profile page.
Legendary for their neutral, correct and pleasant sound, comfort, effectively forever durability, and being affordable to boot.
I can plug them to current or 40 year old hardware, and they do work. I use them with Topping DX3 Pro+[0] today.
It is no wonder they want us to instead adopt something active, crippled with bluetooth latency and dependent on lossy codecs, with a non-serviceable battery built-in.
0. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
Actual fact: sales were up 3% last year, a whopping $15 million.
With wired headphones the number of steps in volume - or if there even are discrete steps - is only dictated by the device driving the headphones. With wireless I can usually only choose between "a little too quiet" and "a little too loud". To this day I am puzzled why devices are arbitrarily limited in that way.
Not to mention some wireless headphones are simply too quiet even on max volume and there is no way to change that. The manufacturer decided you can't have loud headphones and so they never will be, too bad.
It seemed cool, people bought it, and then eventually many realized they didn't care about the fancy feature(s).
Keeping the battery charged is a weak point though, agreed.
The difference is the battery dies in the wireless models in 2-3 years irrespective of the brand but these wired headphones live on for ever.
The Sony MDR-J10s I used to buy stopped being manufactured, and old stock is showing up online less often for more money. They were also never the most durable model, which wasn't a problem when they were easier to replace.
So what are some good, durable wired headphones? Suitable for active use, cords not going to snap with a light tug, don't fall off when running, plug/wire connection doesn't wear out and need to be held just so?
You can also load your hearing test results (from either an audiologist or a hearing test app like https://mimi.io/products/mimi-hearing-test-app) into Apple Health and then use them with your Earbuds.
Like, I have opinions about high-end headphones based on how easy the cords are to replace. That shouldn't be the case.
I was a discrete headphone amp guy, just to situate myself in this market. I didn't expect to get good wireless headphones and think "I'm never going back", but that's precisely what happened.
The audio quality difference between that class of headphone and Airpods Max is within the threshold of "speaker cable differences". All 4 of them put you in territory where source quality and delivery is the primary issue.
Even in the extreme case where you're replacing them every other year you could buy a handful of spares right away so you have them on hand when you need them and your headphones will outlast the batteries in your airpods
Is it the specs fault? Hard to believe if they have gone through at least 5 major revisions. Is it those stupid engineers that didn't implement the spec? Is it the chipsets? I want to see a "who made Bluetooth suck?" Showdown
I have a pair of Airpod Pros that I use solely for audiobooks and podcasts when I'm doing chores or shopping, but the audio quality is so garbage that's all they're really good for.
e.g. https://www.soundguys.com/apple-airpods-pro-3-review-close-t...
My Airpod Pros are the most convenient personal audio device I have ever used. Sound wise they pale in comparison to my Sony MDR-ZX100 which I bought on sale for $9.99 at Best Buy...unfortunately the new model is about $15 regular price and maybe not as good (but I doubt it).
Sure the Airpod Pros sound better than ordinary Airpods or the wired Airbuds, but that's a really low bar for an audio device.
If you are lucky and have a good ear shape, then airpods sound good. Still not as good as IEM because IEMs have more space for better drivers without needing a battery or bluetooth hardware.
But if you are a person like me who has very hard time with any earbud staying in, then its gonna sound like garbage because you are never going to get a perfect seal.
Airpods Pro have great audio quality considering they are wireless bluetooth earbuds. Remove that qualifier, and if you're sitting at a desk all day and wired becomes an option, you can get far better sound quality/longevity for a fraction of the price.
What do you mean? There are tons of wired headphones that don't do noise cancelling at multiple price points.
I can still pick up a new pair of headphones that I started using 10 years ago (AudioTechnica m50x if you want the recommendation).
Shokz had a black friday deal on Open-Run Pros and those are my goto. Admittedly, they are not as convenient as my Airpods were, but my ears appreciate not being bombarded with noise canceling.
I prefer other technologies over noise cancelling in my ordinary use anyway. And my ears feel healthier. But that’s me, not you.
They're awful in several other ways too, which is sad for what should be their flagship model
The only wireless headphones worth the hassle of using Bluetooth (which never connects on the first try, disconnects randomly all the time, and is generally far too unreliable for daily use) are shockz bone conducting.
If shockz made a wired version I’d only buy those
They work just like new and there is something really satisfying about bringing old tech back to a useful life.
I’m using them for monitoring things that don’t have Bluetooth.
I still use AirPods day to day though because it’s so useful to always have something in your pocket that can block unpleasant noise. Bluetooth works fine for me.
If someone made a cable with a mic on it for them I'd probably buy 10--it's pretty annoying to switch to Apple earbuds for calls, but whatever.
You can also go for moderately priced cans and just feel your ears tingling the first time you listen to something through them.
It's true that humans are not particularly sensitive to audio quality, but they are very sensitive to audio latency. If all you do is listen to buffered audio sources then latency is not important but the moment you need to use your headphones in an input loop then wired is the superior technology as it offers close to zero variance in latency.
Wired is for when you want to listen to music you really like and it's too late to use the speakers.
I've been on cheap Android phones and just moved from Samsung to Motorola and both have headphones sockets.
The dongle is tiny and seems to be of good mechanical quality.
I am convinced noise cancellation is causing me tinitus and I don’t seem to get it when I use normal headphones
The microphone and communication protocols on Bluetooth is shit. Everyone that talks alot on the phone knows that the microphone one a wired headset is sooo much better than Bluetooth, simple as that. You hear better and they hear you better. That is it
Or like people who think that brown-shell eggs are better quality than white-shell eggs.
This "service" ended up to be quite popular - broken headphone wires were a very common problem.
I think the average lifespan of wireless headphones is definitely longer than that of wired ones.
Charging is a minor inconvenience, but the freedom of not having tangled mess on my hands when I work while I speak is much more worth it.
I suspect the vat majority of these wired ones are for use during online video calls on office computers and laptops.
We are opressed. Unironically I am so annoyed. It was an "ick" before and now its cool again. Okay whatever.
https://zikman.audio/blog/cable-microphonics-what-it-is-and-...
Also sometimes called the stethoscope effect.
I think strictly speaking, this isn't actually microphonics, because that means that mechanical noise causes electrical noise, which then results in audible noise, whereas what is happening is just transmission of vibrations up the cable into the ear.
Anyway, it can be fixed with better cables. They don't have to be fancy (they don't have to be the 349 euro cables that site is selling!) - i have a pair of KZ ZS10 Pro X earphones, and using the stock cables, i don't get rustling through those.
(more generally, i have an embarrassing number of Chi-Fi earphones, and don't get rustling with any of them)
When I'm wearing wired earbuds, the feeling of getting the cord caught on something and having the earbuds violently yanked from my ears is one of the most annoying things, like a slap in the face.
Plus I like being able to put my phone wherever I want, when I'm listening to podcasts while doing yard work. The phone stays in the house, or on a patio table, not in my pocket where pruning shears or dirt will get to it.
There are various other situations where having wires going to my ears is annoying or impossible.
Personally I use wired headphone at home, either open back or closed back depending on the situation and Bluetooth outside when I don't want to be bothered by a cable.
I think it gets the best of both worlds. Couldn't care less if I look 'cheap' because I have Bluetooth headphone.
- Disposable
- Small-but-not-zero fire risk inside your backpack or your ear
- Pairing woes
- Expensive
- No user-replaceable batteries
Someone's going to come and say how much they like them, but you need to remember that "needing to deal with a cable sometimes" does not actually qualify as inconvenience. When the washing machine was invented, 10s of hours of labor were freed up from people so they could either get more work done or pursue leisure and enjoy life. What did wireless headphones do for people? Prevent them from needing to exercise the tiny amount of impulse control necessary to to run your cable?
Switch to USBC from the old audio jacks though? Negotiable
Sustainability is good.
"Wearing wireless 24/7 tells me you don't own any land."
I wonder how much is being driven by such lead following.
I know kids are switching to mp3 players because of that.
My default is always to buy wired devices, and only consider wireless in situations where the convenience specifically outweighs the downsides - wireless earbuds while exercising or working outside, or while traveling light to listen to a podcast or work at a cafe.
The rest of the time? Wired keyboard, wired mouse, wired headphones, wired controller, wire microphone, etc etc etc.
For a fraction of price of professional monitor speakers, you get the closest thing to direct hardware-to-brain audio transmission. It's precise and fast transient-wise.
No reflections, no phase problems, nada. You can choose exactly the type of frequency response you need: flat, V-shaped, U-shaped, bassy, bright, whatever. There are even models with switchable curves.
No need to invest much more money than your speakers cost in your listening room, installing wool/foam pads/draping/soft furniture/bass traps/carpets etc to reduce the amount of reflections and bring frequency responce to anything resembling flat.
That said, there is a huge number of IEMs produced these days and they range from absolute trash to stellar. And to navigate this vast ocean, I find Crinnacle's resourses utterly useful:
https://crinacle.com/rankings/iems/
https://list.hangout.audio/iem
(disclosure: I'm not affiliated in any way, I just adore this guy's dedication!)
Sometimes a Matrix glitch occurs and someone produces a total outlier, like Philips SHE3580, a $10 little wonder I used for many years to write music, and the mixes produced with those translated literally everywhere without any surprises (in audio engineering, translation is the ability of an audio track to sound as close as possible to the sound engineer's intent on as wide range of audio equipment as possible).
They had a single diaphragm drive, which is usually regarded as slow and less precise than other types of drivers, but they sounded very linear and only slightly less precise than many much more expensive models with multiple balanced armature drivers.
I believe, their performance/price ratio was closer to infinity than anything out there on the market.
But alas, built with biodergadation or planned obsolescence in mind, they finally deteriorated mechanically to the point of falling apart completely.
Fashion is fickle and it's best to not pay any attention to it. Choose the right tool for the job. Sometimes wireless is better, like when running, sometimes wired is better, like doing serious listening in a quiet environment.
All these arguments here about technological superiority are quaint but miss the point. People in the wider world don't have the same concerns the people of HN have here, they're following icons.
The convenience of being able to get up and walk around the house, or got out with the phone without wires getting caught makes it worthwhile though. On the other hand for stationary peripherals like mice I would never go wireless. I hate that feeling of complete helplessness to the pairing/connection lottery and the time waste of it.
For about a month we had videos of people getting in fist fights over fucking Stanley tumblers of all things, those stupid Labubus popped off too, and God knows how many other things come and go in like a month. Unless theirs a sustained long term resurgence in the market, it's probably just another tiktok fad.
"traditional speakers are replacing headphones"
They have a good mic and fit properly.
AirPods, nope nope nope. I could throw them away after one year and the multi device “dream” s was a nightmare.
I still have my HD580, but I don’t want to have the big cups on anymore
I love my wired headphones though. They support BT but I've used that maybe twice. Ever. Obviously was only because I was using my phone with them, which again don't have a port for the cord.
They often produce models that cost 25% as much and perform much better than the comparable Apple offerings.
I think Apple is in a "fashion tier" that's distinct from "high quality" or "high end".