Posted by billybuckwheat 3 days ago
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- sorry just kidding. I couldn‘t resist.
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.
The article prominently highlights mobile usage, in which case wireless headphones easily win on longevity.
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’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.
Hopefully more Bluetooth headphone companies follow suit. Maybe we can even get a standardized battery.
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!
Your soldering skill (and sense of adventure) would have to be far better than mine to even consider doing that for wireless earbuds.
The trick is to gently scrape the stranded wire with a blade for the solder to stick and to make a good connection.
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.
Plus, the more high end ones come with repleceable cables.
I use wired at home, where I'm not cycling the connection very much.
I LOVED my Grado headphones but destroyed three pairs of them and was soldering my own ends on the cables over and over.
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.
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?
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.
Wired headphones at least if they fall out are still connected to a rope to get them back!
I just wonder if wired fans just never skip forward a song, or adjust the volume. Or even use active noise canceling.
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
This has been a thing in wired headphones since at least 2007 lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though I've been working with writing software for esp32 and so that might change in the next month or so.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Old-school DJing! Imagine carefully positioning the laser on a CD...
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:
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?
In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)
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.
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...
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?
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.
well actually...
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.
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.
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.
Gaming headsets are usually 2.4GHz wireless, and pro audio stuff is ~500-800MHz and the proper stuff requires a wireless license to use.
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.
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.
"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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple themselves know this. Every MacBook, no matter how few ports it has and how “non-pro” it is, ships with a headphone jack.
Particularly for spoken word, it's annoying and distracting.
Cables can wear out. You can get a wire break.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
For mobile devices I can understand it and do use it.
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).
However, some of the other devices in my home are absolute crap with bluetooth headphones, particularly my windows desktop and my steam deck.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Products that don't exist yet... so, future innovation? No innovation allowed unless it incentivises and streamlines further innovation? Count me in!
Are you claiming no other wireless earphones exist other than apples'??
"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.
> 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...
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.
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.
The same applies to pro gamers. Latency and empty batteries are a big no-no.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Actually, they're so good, they're still making and selling the exact same model.
“ 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.
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.
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.