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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

There’s been a lot of grumbling about RTO at my work, and if it happens, these will be a day one purchase. I used to have some Bowers and Wilkins PX headphones that I liked, and my wife really loves her Bose QuietComfort, but the weird thing I detested about both of those is how seemingly every headphone manufacturer except Apple feels the needs to add voice feedback to your device? “Headphones connected” and whatnot. It just really messes with my vibes, man.

Also quite frankly I’d rather just not have to buy them and keep working from home. Listening to music using good speakers is an objectively superior experience.

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I have a couple of versions of the sony equivalent, and am very happy with them. You can turn off the voice feedback in the app.

As a note for others looking at the Bose side:

On the Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra 2 I've found you can disable voice prompts for "Connections & Calls" and "Battery Level on Startup" but not for everything e.g. "USB Audio" and "Bluetooth Audio" will play each time you switch the source.

We are in the hell dimension. Headphone manufacturers are sent to punish us. It's the only explanation that makes sense: these are not the headphones we need, but they are the headphones we deserve.

After removing buttons and switches with physical semantics, extending response latency, and decreasing reliability, they were running out of ways to torment us. The slow, obnoxious voices gave them a bit more runway. They even deal bonus combo damage when the headphones try and fail to connect to devices you told them to forget with their app (which made you sign up for an account, of course) and the slow, obnoxious voices agonizingly narrate the saga of failure before you are allowed to listen to your music.

I am currently on Bose QC Ultra 1 specifically because it allowed disabling the voice whereas WH-1000XM5 didn't (it had a setting, but it only applied to a subset). Did they get rid of that on QCU 2?

The latency is annoying, and based on the fact that there are 8K hz poll rate mice, latency doesn’t have to be an issue with wireless.

Happy to be corrected, I bet you can via the app. Thanks for the tip, I’ll look into it! My wife’s QCU 2s are absolutely luxurious and live up to the “comfort” name 100%.

Mice can do that because they require so little bandwidth. Bluetooth has a latency/bw tradeoff (this is why Bluetooth microphones are so horrible, though the handsfree profile is also neglected generally).

My number two complaint about AirPods Pro is that decreasing the volume of system sounds doesn’t seem to do much. Every time the low battery message makes me jolt and is a bit deafening. It is nice that it’s has no vocal component, but it’s still quite annoying. Curious if anyone compared them to Max in this regard.

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