yeah sure not having a wire is nice, but two generations of earbuds from my phones own manufacturer and both pairs i get regularly dogshit audio quality, and half the time one of the buds doesn’t even work or produces barely any audio. There is no way to remedy this even after resetting the buds and the bluetooth connection. and you have to shell out 3x as much money for these things. also it’s yet another device whose charge you have to keep track of
I purchased anker ear buds for everyone in my family after my apple airpods failed after 18 mos and they have been running strong ever since! Still 80% charged after a 2 hr half marathon. A week or two between case charges. Zero complaints on audio quality. Would never ask for the wire back or try to convince myself that audiophiles listen to music on their phones if they care about quality.
fuck touch controls btw
I’ve hated this from the beginning and people act like I’m crazy for it. So happy to be among my people here
I will never forgive the person who started taking away the 3.5mm jack from phones. What an absolute waste of oxygen.
When they removed the headphone jack from almost all smartphones was genuinely when I stopped buying smartphones. fucking bastards lol
little individual buds with nothing to stop you from losing them down a storm drain or in the grass or whatever and no room for antennas or anything are just like, not that great of an idea to begin with, but fine, some people like them. Except bluetooth is such a dogshit protocol that designing a custom set of chips for both phone and earbuds that extend the protocol and are supposed to make everything run smoothly was the only way to get such a product off the ground and not be a flop. But it only takes one to be a trendsetter and then it kinda doesn’t matter if the other copycat products are any good, everyone just wants the cool buds. If they don’t work reliably you better just buy the latest flagship, your 2 year old flagship obviously is just dogshit and you can’t expect phone manufacturers to actually test their products for compatibility. Oh and they might not work worth a shit with that flagship either, especially with the 2.4ghz band being so utterly destroyed by noise
And of course the batteries are typically completely unserviceable so the lifespan is like 2 years tops, maybe a bit more if you baby them and dont mind the degrading battery performance. All to “improve” away one of those technologies that basically worked great and didnt need it. I have headphones from 1975, another from the late 80s, another from the late soviet union/early independent ukraine, and some more modern examples, and they all work with any device with a headphone jack and reliably sound anywhere from fine to excellent. All but a few of the cheapest modern examples are basically infinitely repairable too, if the jack goes bad it takes 15 mins and little skill to resolder them. Occasionally the cord is annoying, but thats the price you pay for shit actually working reliably and not being a brief transition state of e-waste.
And don’t get me started on Chi-Fi, the shit you can get for barely $20 now basically blows the pants off of any bluetooth ever made. And the mic quality of a wired mic that sits right next to your mouth is 5x better too
Chi-Fi
I really really like these cheap buds I got from Faaeal, they sit in your ear but not inserted in your ear canal, so you still have situational awareness and can hear what’s going on around you.
Most of the chifi buds I’ve seen are like Moondrops where they go in your ear canal, do you know of any that are like my Faaeal Iris buds?
Faaeal
huh idk what I expected by that description but it was defs something more exotic than 2005-style big round buds
I think Faaeal technically qualifies as chifi but BGVP also has a couple higher end options. I never liked that style though so I don’t have personal experience with any of them https://bgvp.aliexpress.com/store/1101353038/pages/all-items.html?productGroupId=10000001069587
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802602143691.html
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805418464331.html etc. these brands all have at least one or two flat options
Seems like “flat” or “flat head” is the search term
huh idk what I expected by that description but it was defs something more exotic than 2005-style big round buds
Lol, I have really simple tastes in general, and I don’t really like the fit of IEMs. My daily drivers at home are a pair of large planar magnetic open backed headphones, so I also like how ‘open’ the faaeal buds sound.
“Flat Head”, thank you! That seems to be the style. The hard round speaker casing with the foam covers just fits really nice for my ears. The problem is every pair of those style you find out in stores are really cheap crap anymore, way back the cheapo pairs felt just like the faaeal ones do to me now.
i used bluetooth for my car once and it totally fucked everything up. now when i use an aux cord it tries using both (even though i turn off the bluetooth) and produces crackling. fuck bluetooth
Doing a factory reset shouldn’t be too hard, what’s the car?
in my rage i forgot to mention it was beforr my current car and i havent touched bluetooth in my current one lol
i love wired earbuds!!
i love spending $5 for high quality audio!!!
i love not having to worry about losing them because they’re attached to my phone/computer!!!
I feel like a disgusting old person, but I still do prefer actual wired earpieces. The sound is decent, the technology is solid, they last forever, and yes they never get lost. Maybe my ear is big, but earbuds have always fallen out of my ear, which really ruins the experience.
The amount of times I’ve had to help a student find their tiny lost earbud
I also highly prefer wired. If that’s not an option, the best compromise I’ve found so far is a model where the two actual earbuds are wired together and they only connect to your device via bluetooth. It’s a short cable, so you can very comfortably wear it behind your neck so you don’t have worry about them falling out or losing them. Decent sound too and they’ve lasted more than a year so far despite being cheap compared to other bluetooth earbuds
model where the two actual earbuds are wired together
yeah those things are fuckin great compared to individual buds
I still use wired headphones, just now I have to choose between charging my phone or using my headphones because they use the same port now. (I bought one of those splitter things once but it didn’t work for me, idk why. Maybe I just got a faulty one)
Good, cheap wireless noise-cancelling headphones are one of the few legitimately wonderful technological advancements of the last 10 years. Very few things help my with my ADHD as much as these fuckers.
Annoying coworker breathing like a 400 m runner? Headphones. Loud, stressful supermarket? Headphones. The little kid downstairs throws it’s third tantrum of the day? You know it.
Cables can suck it. I will wrestle Bluetooth anyday before getting my head yanked back because I forgot my headset has a cable and i suddenly got up to get some water.
(some) full size headphones get a pass IMO because they actually have enough space for an antenna that has a range greater than 6-12 inches, often have a backup wired input, and are generally held together with screws so you can actually replace the battery when it starts to go in like 2 years. individual wireless buds are the disposable vape of headphones. The sound quality is still likely to be worse, but I can at least understand the tradeoff, and the ANC requires it be stuffed with electronics anyhow so why not also make it wireless.
And to think of all the fucking batteries going into e-waste because of them. They managed to cram 3 into TWS earbuds
the cost of convenience
I’ve found this is one of the areas in the market where brands actually make a big difference, and some quality legacy brands clearly don’t give a shit. Active noise cancelling is a godsend for someone like myself with ADHD or autism in loud spaces. Then there’s some brands that have LDAC high quality audio over Bluetooth. I found that Anker Soundcore is pretty great in these respects, and they have some pretty inexpensive models. However, the controls on my now two year old models are hit and miss. I disabled the wear detection on the headphones, and the touch controls on the earbuds. The headphones don’t respond to volume controls on the phone, and they don’t work when connected to my computer so only the computer controls the volume 🤷♀️.
The earbuds were a design that is shit for staying in your ears while active, so I’d recommend carefully reading reviews and get a set that have the little stem that hangs down from your ear maybe?
Other than that, they sound really good, have tuneable eq, strong noise cancelling, and a lot of models of their headphones allow you to use an aux cord.
I like when I’m walking through home depot and the audio starts to break up. It’s like, " hey dipshit, you left your phone on the bike."
Well i guess it has pros and cons. A pro would be for example that you can connect it to the bluetooth speakers in your car, or any other device where cable wouldn’t do. A con is that cable is simply more sturdy and less fickle.
The same goes for internet connectivity. All bigger servers are connected over cable, because it simply is more reliable and has higher throughput than wireless. But also, with wireless, you can move around the house without worrying about stumbling on cables and accidentally plugging them out.
A con is that cable is simply more sturdy and less fickle.
Maybe versus bad Bluetooth devices. But when you have two devices that are actually good I’ve had very little issues with Bluetooth. With my iPhone and AirPods I’ve had a single digit number of issues with it connecting.
Meanwhile I’ve gone through an ungodly number of earbuds and audio cables in my life. Never again having to resolder the headphone jack on my phone is well worth it.
“bluetooth-only” not the mere concept of bluetooth. phones before 2016 could still do all the things you mention.
also wifi is a pretty bad analogy tbh. not only is it not nearly as shitty and unreliable as bluetooth, but the typical use case is way different. listening to music from a device in your pocket or hand to speakers in your ears is pretty different from running ethernet around your house (and if even a small amount of effort is put in you could run ethernet around your house in such a way that it isn’t in the way, even if ugly. if anything the cost is more prohibitive than dealing with a bunch of cables)
Many new phones don’t even have a digital audio converter built in anymore, so the basic USB C to 3.5mm pass through dongles don’t work. You have to get a dedicated DAC dongle and many can’t even charge the phone while they are in use, it’s insane.
Oh now that’s fuckin annoying. The dongle was always an acceptable compromise to me
A forgone conclusion in retrospect. Particularly with a company like Apple who has a vested interested in no longer supporting 3.5mm alternatives to begin with. Companies want you in their ecosystem to keep selling you their products. Although simply not supporting it for cost related and technical reasons is also a factor i’m sure
cursed prediction: proprietary headphones get sound quality privileges on their manufacturer’s devices… users pay a subscription fee for “compatibility” with non-proprietary headphones
cursed prediction: proprietary headphones get sound quality privileges on their manufacturer’s devices… users pay a subscription fee for “compatibility” with non-proprietary headphones
This is already partially true, Galaxy Buds and Pixel Buds have better support/features on their vertically integrated Android flavor compared to others.
god damn it
you really would think bluetooth would be good by now and not routinely a pain in the ass but no
It is, you just can’t buy bottom of the barrel garbage.
And don’t ignore your phone itself. I know Sony in particular has some of the worst Bluetooth connectivity. Which is very funny because they make a fuck ton of Bluetooth headphones.
I swear it actually gets worse over time as devices try to cram more complexity into the protocol it craps out for me constantly regardless of device. I could write a thesis on how much shit Bluetooth has caused me over the years and anyone who says to me “it just works” instantly becomes my sworn enemy
My theory is that its at least partly the incredibly polluted nature of the 2.4Ghz band but bluetooth as a protocol has also always been fuckign atrocious
yep i still find myself constantly having to forget and re-pair shit especially when multiple host devices are involved, really seems like that should be a solved problem.
That’s unfortunate but I feel like it has gotten incrementally better especially with exercise centric earphones where before I had to have line of sight between the phone and the earphones otherwise the audio would cut out also the general improvements over time are volume used to be independent between sending and receiving devices, range was extremely limited, pairing was slow and unreliable, RF interference was a constant problem, much better battery life
I’ve been using Bluetooth since 2010 when I got my first smartphone. I’ve had various iPhones and androids but iPhones have always been more reliable with their BT implementation not sure why. Some devices just suck though
Fundamentally at the end of the day unrepairable lithium battery devices will never be something i want for the nebulous benefits they bring. We need less battery operated ewaste not more
agreed
