This isn't a Vinyl vs CD thing where a clearly inferior technology lives on due mainly to sentimental reasons. There are a number of concrete advantages to wired headphones over bluetooth headphones.
- 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.
- they last forever. I still have sennheiser hd380 pro cans from 25 years ago that sound great.
- 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.
It is worth pointing out that not all parts age equally well. The cushions especially are not that durable and should be considered consumables.
Sennheiser provides replacements should you need them. The effect they have on the sound is much bigger than you might think.
I have some Sony cans that have lasted for over a decade and multiple third party suppliers have made the foam pieces easy to procure.
> Sennheiser provides replacements should you need them.
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 to replace the pads on my Sony 7506 cans as well. I was very impressed with the parts that can be replaced on these cans. The packing includes an exploded diagram of the parts.
I love my 7506s. And I have a recurring event on my calendar to remind me to buy new pads every 2 years. That's almost exactly how long they last. I've tried 3 brands and they've all lasted almost exactly 2 years. The original Sony pads also lasted 2 years.
Yeah the sound stage definitely gets impacted. I tend to use leather cups in the winter and fabric ones in the summer. Nothing worse than sweating from your temples while you work.
A friend worked at sennheiser about 15 years ago and I took advantage of his cost-price deal on a pair of HD700. They are, without a doubt, the best sounding and most comforted cans I've ever used. Now, I treated them badly, throwing them into ruck sacks etc, and eventually one of the transducers failed. I contacted Sennheiser who charged me €140 to "repair" them... They sent me a brand new set with the thick silver core cable (I never sent mine back so now I have two, and those cost over 100 bucks by themselves)
How do they compare to Bose QuietComfort?
- sorry just kidding. I couldn‘t resist.
> they last forever
Until my cat finds them.
Any serious set of wired headphones better have replaceable wires because apparently they are delicious
Any cable, I tell you ... any cable. Ruined multiple USB cables, and almost went through two Laptop charger cable.
Replaceable cables have always been a high priority for me. I've been using SHURE SE215 for almost 2 decades at this point.
Yeah for me the main sell of wireless is mobility/freedom of movement.
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.
I’ve used many pairs of wired headphones over the years, cheap and expensive, and never had ones with a cable that didn’t eventually fail, unless they mostly stay plugged into a single device.
The article prominently highlights mobile usage, in which case wireless headphones easily win on longevity.
I think it’s maybe close to a wash between non-replaceable batteries in wireless headphones dying and cords failing, in my experience at least. The ideal case IMO is over-ear headphones that have a replaceable cord—I have some 14 year old Bose QCs and some newer Beyerdynamics, both of which I’ve replaced the cord on.
I bought a pair of Philips headphones with a replaceable cord. Instead the jack became loose.
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.
Have batteries actually ever FAILED in wireless headphones? Sure, they degrade and charge becomes lower, but I've never had them outright fail. A headphone that lasts my 2-3 hours of commute/daily use is completely useable, even if it's original charge lasted 5 hours.
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.
My sennheiser earbuds are now down to 15 minutes of battery life. Less if it's a cold day. Sure, they're not completely dead yet, but they're effectively useless. And it's not like I can easily replace the batteries. Most wired earbuds or headphones at a similar price point have replaceable cables.
My daughter had to replace the LiPo battery in her headphones twice after they would not charge at all.
All my corded headphones lasted at most 2 years of mobile use. My QC35s are still going strong. Wired sucks for mobile use. And if the cord doesn’t go, the 3.5mm socket does. I replaced multiple sockets on my iPod and iPhone 3g. That replacement process sucks.
The difference is I can easily fix a broken cable.
Of course you can get the Fairbuds which have replaceable batteries.
Hopefully more Bluetooth headphone companies follow suit. Maybe we can even get a standardized battery.
I've used tons of wired as well. Maybe have bad one pair fail at the wire? I'm super active with them too. Snowboarding with them and my Sony g shock in 1998. Lots of cycling and running usage. You've had every single pair of wired headphones fail for you? Every single pair?
> my Sony g shock
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?
Haha whoops, I totally conflated the two! The Sony Atrac3Plus had a feature called "G Protection". It was the only "anti skip" cd player that I tried that actually worked really well back then.
I also exaggerated the year a bit. After looking it up, I think this cd player came out in 2004!
Most high end headphones have a replaceable cable. What have you tried on the expensive end of the spectrum?
Not even high-end nowadays, you really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for something with a nonreplaceable cable. Even for iems.
Cord failure is definitely a problem, but if you’re moderately capable with a soldering iron, it’s easy to repair the cord if the failure is away from the headphone side. It’s even fairly easy to replace an 8mm or 0.25” jack.
Your soldering skill (and sense of adventure) would have to be far better than mine to even consider doing that for wireless earbuds.
The few times I've tried to solder headphone wire I've been defeated because the wire isn't wire, it's some kind of copper and synthetic fiber weave, that the solder just won't adhere to.
It's an unbelievably thin stranded wire, but the wires are coated so they can be in contact with each other without shorting. It's all twisted around a thin thread of cotton or nylon to add strength, then then encased in it's sheath.
The trick is to gently scrape the stranded wire with a blade for the solder to stick and to make a good connection.
I've repaired a few headphone wires; theyre usually thin copper wires covered with enamel insulation. Burn off the insulation with a blob of solder, or sand it off, and the solder will stick.
You’re right, the kind of cable often used is not easy to solder. This makes it hard to solder a broken cable together again, or to replace a broken / bent plug. So best replace the entire cable and its plug — it’s still an inexpensive part.
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.
Same here. Wired headphones never lasted anywhere near as long for me as wireless ones. Any with inline controls were especially prone to failure.
or in my experience active use can damage the headphone jack, which is much, much worse
I’ve repaired many pairs of wired headphones over the years, as electronic repairs go they’re very simple. The same can’t be said for the wireless ones.
Plus, the more high end ones come with repleceable cables.
Absolutely, As I said, it comes down to personal usage, needs, preferences. I personally never lost a cable (I did need to replace the earpads, but that happened on both Bluetooth and wired:). I do tend to use connected wireless earbuds when I go jogging etc.
For me it was worse, the headphone port on my phones always eventually failed. Maybe these rich people replace phones too quickly to experience that.
I use wired at home, where I'm not cycling the connection very much.
One of the key features (for me) of my Sennheiser HD 600 was the replaceable cables. Plugs at both ends of the cable.
I LOVED my Grado headphones but destroyed three pairs of them and was soldering my own ends on the cables over and over.
I have not had an issue with any wires wearing out anywhere since my walkman headphones in the 90s.
There are lots of wired headphones out there with replaceable cables
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.
Let’s critically think about this for just a second. Your concern doesn’t appear to be with the audio, isn’t it with the connector? That’s a whole different argument than what we’re talking about
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?
I prefer wired ones, mostly playing devil’s advocate here.
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.
Going cheap is the problem here, good earbuds and headphones have replaceable cables.
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.
Expensive headphones have much higher quality cables...
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Same. Either the jack fails or the one of the buds stops working or the cable on one side of the buds gets cut somehow.
I got wired headphones after repeatedly losing airpods falling out of my ears onto the floor of planes. I like to sleep with my headphones in falling asleep to audiobooks, and I'm a side-sleeper so airpods would rub on the pillow and get lost in the seat machinery.
Wired headphones at least if they fall out are still connected to a rope to get them back!
For sleep a wired pillow speaker works great, the advantage being there is nothing to fall out of your ears, and you can isolate the sound so only you hear it through the pillow: https://www.amazon.com/Crane-Company-PS2-SoftSpeaker-Speaker...
For airplanes, Bose or Sony both have noise-canceling wireless headphones in over-ear format with battery life over 18 hours. I wouldn't try to side-sleep in either one, but the relative quiet on aircraft is wonderful, especially if you find yourself on a turboprop.
They also lack any and all useful features. Even just the ability to tap for pause is critical to my daily life.
I just wonder if wired fans just never skip forward a song, or adjust the volume. Or even use active noise canceling.
Many wired headphones have a little control thingy with buttons on the wire. Four pin aux connectors support control signals. If your headphones have a detachable aux cable I suppose you can just replace it with cable with controls.
The touch functionality is useful until it isn't. My Pixel Buds will activate touch controls randomly and unnecessarily all the time when I'm trying to use them in bed, from the contact with the pillow or sheets. Drives me nuts.
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.
Other advantages: for music production, wired studio headphones don't have lag - also wired with mic is crucial for video games for same reason
Hah, just shows how out of touch I am. Has ANC disappeared as a wired earphone feature? I keep meaning to shop for a new all-purpose pair with ANC, duplex audio, and either USB-C input or an adapter for that. But, I keep procrastinating. I don't have any headphones that work with my phone since the analog port disappeared.
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.
if the phone is in your pants pocket then its fairly trivial to change the volume just by using the buttons on the phone
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
Tons of wired headphones have little controllers on them to change songs and pause.
> I just wonder if wired fans just never skip forward a song, or adjust the volume.
This has been a thing in wired headphones since at least 2007 lol
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I bought a tiny lapel clip Bluetooth receiver that has buttons and a headphone socket. Charge over USB, pair with phone, turn any headphones into Bluetooth. If the battery runs out, plug the headphones straight into the phone.
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
I have some Sony headphones from a decade ago with a detachable cable. Noise cancellation works just fine when wired, and you get better battery life since the Bluetooth part isn’t active. The only time you can’t use noise cancellation is when it’s charging (Micro-USB, doesn’t do audio over USB in case you were wondering).
Re: noise canceling... recently got a pair of IEMs (Etymotic ER2XR) with good foam tips and their isolation blows away any ANC I've ever tried. The only thing is noise from touching the cable but that was solved with some ear hooks to put the cables behind my ears.
Yeah, Etymotic headphones were my go-to for probably a decade. Passive noise suppression was wonderful for public transport.
The utility has dropped tremendously though, now that headphone jacks have disappeared.
Would love to have a pair of "direct-USB-C" Etymotics.
Qudelix 5k (portable dac/amp) has weak anc / passthrough mode, only in Bluetooth mode.
by definition you're literally within 2 feet of the device playing the music; how hard is it to use your device to do any of that and more?
Probably an exaggeration? But I hope that tapping for pause isn't critical for anyone's daily life.
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.
I just tap a button on the thing the headphones are plugged into. The cable isn't so long that it's ever out of reach.
Or ever do anything in parallel with listening. I’ve been working in my garden and went to a shed that’s like 15 meters away from my home only to notice that I’ve forgotten to take my phone with me - music never stopped.
I use a pocket for this scenario.
but it WILL cut out if you go far enough. wired headsets wont
That was solved long ago with invention of pockets.
Many wired headphones have buttons and wheels too. We've been adjusting things via them for so long lol.
Many have a small box on the cord with those controls, and you could argue that's handier since it's closer to where your hands naturally are at any given moment.
> they last forever
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.
Those hd380’s will last your lifetime. Almost like Sony’s MDR-7506 if you can keep it from getting sat on.
100% this. I have had the MDR-7506 since my DJ days about 30 years ago. These are by no means expensive headphones, but compared even to much more higher-end Bluetooth headphones they can easily hold their own. They have good depth and are well balanced. They are just about indestructible, only requiring the occasional pads replacement. Probably one of the best purchases I ever made
Relationships come and go but MDR-7605’s are for life!
I work with a lot of audio in a professional capacity. You're correct if you're saying that neither tech is universally "teh best".
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.
> Tack on that they don't have latency, though I've never really tried to track vocals on wireless cans
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".
> The truth is that the OS usually hides the latency of wireless heapdhones, e.g. airpods, by delaying video to keep it in sync.
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.
ugh the most annoying thing about the conversation clash latency is that the person causing the issue just thinks others are being weirdly rude.
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 have some Asus gamer earbuds with a dongle for a proprietary BT alternative: zero perceptible latency.
> Wireless headphones tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and made it worse.
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.
Do you have a German word for ignoring the things the person you’re replying to liked about a given thing?
Most of this thread is already exploring the consumer perspective, and as the previous poster said they couldn't talk about the professional perspective, I chose to only focus on the production/broadcast angle in my comment.
Fair enough. There are plenty of reasons why I don't have professional experience monitoring over BT wireless, which you lay out well.
Though I've been working with writing software for esp32 and so that might change in the next month or so.
Produktivegesprach
> bluetooth'd 3M ear muffs.
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
Well, I have had them for about 2 years and would buy them again.
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.
Oooo AA batteries? fuckyeah
Nothing like two weeks of my podcasts getting interruped every half hour by a voice saying "battery low"... :D
I think a big part of the reason is that there is only one wireless option -Bluetooth- and it is a terrible product from a user experience perspective. It's 2026 and I still can't move through my world with earbuds in without my audio randomly switching to my wife's car in the driveway or our Bluetooth speaker that is on upstairs.
> only one wireless option -Bluetooth- and it is a terrible product from a user experience perspective
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…
No, it happens even with AirPods Pro/Pro2.
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.
If a spec is regularly implement poorly, the spec is the problem.
> ...your scenario just does not happen.
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 don't need charging, but you will hear static regularly when attaching/detaching/touching things. Also, they pick up RF interference (TBF, BT ones also drop packets in RF-noisy environments, but they seem to be more resistant to it)
* 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.
> (TBF, BT ones also drop packets in RF-noisy environments, but they seem to be more resistant to it)
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.
Also you get reliable sound quality. The DACs in the iPhones were always decent. Now you have no idea what kind of quality you're going to get from a given listening device. Plenty of them are noisy POSes; my girlfriend had a Belkin adapter that had automatic gain (!) and would ramp up to blast hiss through the car stereo during quiet segments... and sometimes even during non-quiet ones.
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.
Vinyls are not necessarily the inferior technology. Given the choice, I'd prefer to play vinyl in some cases. In social settings vinyl's short length and need to be flipped creates a dynamic social environment. Someone has to regularly choose new music to play, acting with intent to do so. Someone has to regularly walk to the machine. These create dynamism and flow. CDs are much longer, and less tactile. There's less of the my turn your turn, who is going to flip the thing.
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.
This is like saying “Candles are superior to lightbulbs because they burn out quicker and thats an advantage in some situations”.
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.
Instead of "Candles are a superior way to light a room" you can say "Candles are a superior way to create a romantic vibe in a room".
Candles/Vinyl can be superior if you clarify the metric you're optimizing for.
Just so.
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!)
In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks".
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.
> In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks".
I don't see how this is different between a record and a CD.
The killer feature of CD players is shuffling and skipping tracks.
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.
As someone who grew up during the transition, the killer feature of the CD was amazing audio quality and the lack of degradation from every playback. The period where we started finding albums marked "DDD", for fully digital production, was also amazing.
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...
There's one (related) difference - an LP can hold approx. 45 minutes of music, a CD can hold 80-ish (The original spec called for 74, but I think the most I've seen on a single disc is 82-ish minutes).
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.
Additionally, vinyl has two sides. So you get this lead in and end track on both sides. The flow is different.
That's very succinctly-put. Well done.
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.
The metric being house fires
You have to look beyond the audio engineering on this one.
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).
> Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved
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.
> Artistic expression is not technology.
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.
With this logic you can argue the best audio medium is dirt because if you made good music with dirt, the music must have been so incredible to have counteracted the flaws of dirt as a medium. Ignore the fact that dirt cannot be used as a music medium. (Vacuous truth)
Early Motown records were tracked in a room which had a dirt floor.
Yes, but your "IF" is doing the heavy lifting here and it would be your burden to proof how dirt would be a means of artistic expression before anybody could take your argument seriously.
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.
Yes that's my point with the "if"! And in general I largely agree with you.
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.
> There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.
Old-school DJing! Imagine carefully positioning the laser on a CD...
Adressing your points:
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.
I have huge nostalgia for older analog audio and photo formats for many many reasons. I also don't really miss them. Had a lot of fun and memories with vinyl and processing B&W film in a darkroom--also shot a lot of slides--but you can't go home again and all that.
> Digital is endlessly flexible
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.)
I used to think that, and indeed a computer can run any equations you want. However with analogue you're getting a bunch of interesting-sounding equations without having to think of them and write them down, and that's the "analogue sound." Analogue circuitry isn't a perfect math processor the way digital is, only an approximation, and the deviations from perfection are useful.
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.
I'm convinced that at least 90% of "analog sound" can be simulated by taking the ideal block diagram and replacing every link with a parametric EQ->waveshaper->parametric EQ chain. Configuring those added components correctly is left as an exercise for the reader.
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:
No, you can't argue that the best medium is dirt. Just like you can't argue that the best medium is vinyl.
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?
A CD is 100% technologically capable of having the duration and physical size of a vinyl.
A return to laserdiscs (with CD or BluRay technology and information density) would be wild.
> CD/SACD is kind of like 4K for television.
In theory. In practice most stuff is distorted and compressed to death and might as well be 12-bit ;)
Reminds me of the Autechre album Tri Repetae which was labelled as “Complete with surface noise” on vinyl and “Incomplete without surface noise” on CD.
If they really wanted to do so, they could take the vinyl, play it with all the surface noise they wanted, and record that to CD so they could have the surface noise there, too.
It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
We need a new consumer audio format with the ability to contain playback algorithms! :P
> 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.
Candles are pleasant light, in a way difficult to acquire with other lighting types. That means there's a niche in which that facet is more valuable than the other technologies.
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...
I think we can agree that vinyl sounds different than CD, right? Is it so hard to believe that some people actually prefer the sound of music on vinyl? For such a person, that might be the only metric that matters.
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.
The sound of vinyl is a subset of the sound of CD. If you take a high quality recording of a vinyl record playback and write it to CD, it will sound identical.
Okay, sure. But if I prefer the subset of CD sound that is the same as vinyl, and my favorite band comes out with a new album... I just buy vinyl, right?
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?
Really deep bassnotes can't be reproced by vinyl. The grooves would get too wide IIRC, it's a physical limitation.
Vinyl isn't about technology it is about musicality, art and taste. If you try to explain and reduce vinyl to something technically, you are leaving out the most important part, the artful content that will be enjoyed from it.
RAM shortages will never make vinyl more expensive. Anything digital requires a CPU to work.
AMPs: am I a joke to you?
RAM prices are such an infinitesimally small component cost of digital audio equipment that I can’t take you seriously here.
It was a stretch, so you're right to not take me seriously.
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.
Candles are better than lightbulbs at melting the ends of frayed nylon strings and ropes. :)
And at PM2.5 and VOC output.
> advantage of not requiring power. Vinyl doesn’t even have that.
well actually...
Really good analogy!
I would argue that vinyl sounds better thanks to the Loudness War[0]. CD is technically superior and should sound better but it's been compressed to hell and back during mastering in ways that vinyl simply can't be due to physical limitations. All that wonderful technology and they can't simply let it be so we get good sound quality.
But that has nothing to do with the technology per-se. You could recreate this by just having CDs that don’t use all their space for music and having more of them, if the goal is dynamism. It’s a restriction, not a benefit. You could do the same exact thing with an iPod with playlists that are shorter, and not auto playing after the playlist ends.
For me the fact that vinyl discs wear out is their decisive disadvantage.
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.
I mean, yes they do wear out but the rate is pretty slow if you look after them. I have some of my father’s old early LPs and they still sound pretty good.
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.
He said tape not cassette. Tape would mean real to real tape in this context - cassette doesn't make sense. Tape can be wider than cassette, only two tracks, and run faster - all give you a lot better sound quality. Not as good as a good digital system and it costs more but still very good.
I actually still have an old Grundig reel to reel somewhere, although I can't claim it as ever really hifi.
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.
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Vinyl is for plebs, hiring troubadours for your party is the way.
Please recommend a troubadour who knows the Neat Records, Guardian Records n' Tapes and Heavy Metal Records singles catalogues and I'm sold :)
Known repertoire is a function of BAC only.
Any media that is actively damaged during every use is inferior.
The best meals I've ever had were damaged by their use, and many were quite artistic.
Not if you see it from an artistic perspective.
There’s always one.
And latency!! Anything that needs to be real time is impossible without wired headphones. Even the lowest latency wireless is noticeable.
Not trying to argue against your point, but most of the Bluetooth latency comes from the codec, not from it being wireless. Bluetooth LE Audio comes with LC3 which supports a codec latency of as little as 2.5 ms.
This is the big one for me, I hate all that lag with bluetooth, signal interference, and constantly wondering which device my headphones have connected to. So much easier for so many reasons, with a wire!
I’ve been using AirPods on audio and video calls for many years now, and I notice no latency. Same with my bluetooth mouse.
Try using them to play a twitchy game and you'll notice.
Real time covers a lot of different things, and have a lot of different solutions.
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.
I think we are talking about Bluetooth devices/use cases within the consumer world.
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.
The wireless used for pro audio is never bluetooth, however.
Oh absolutely. The wireless for gaming headsets isn’t Bluetooth either. If your argument is Bluetooth isn’t suitable for real time, I’m on board - I’d even go further and say Bluetooth isn’t suitable for anything other than fire and forget.
Gaming headsets are usually 2.4GHz wireless, and pro audio stuff is ~500-800MHz and the proper stuff requires a wireless license to use.
> They don't need charging.
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.
Why do you have a lot? I have one pair of AirPods and I don’t think it’s ever gone flat on me. I have to charge it less than once a week and it gives me a long notice period before.
Not the op but for me - Different headphones for different purposes.
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.
I just hate the move to wireless for things that don't need to be wireless and having to constantly keep things charged. I got so frustrated with my $100 magic mouse at work a few weeks ago that its now in a drawer and I'm using a $10 POS Dell mouse. My wireless mac keyboard just has the wire permanantly plugged in. And wireless headphones? I've never gone down that road, and never will. I bought a handfull of the $10 Apple 3.5mm to lightning adapter because I lose them frequently, and when I'm eventually forced to upgrade to a phone with USB-C, I'll buy a handfull of the 3.5mm to USB-C adapters.
> This isn't a Vinyl vs CD thing where a clearly inferior technology lives on due mainly to sentimental reasons.
"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.
A lot of people buy vinyls for the albums art.
I'd say buy a poster instead, but it just now occurs to me that they're likely not displaying them full-time, and the LP has the advantages of being a uniform size and made of stiff cardboard for easy storage and retrieval.
So I guess it actually makes sense.
I occasionally use wireless, but 90% of the time I prefer wired for this reason. Reliable, simple, harder to lose, no charging, easier to connect. I just done think the wires are a problem for me, sometimes a benefit, sometimes a mild inconvenience.
Bluetooth also opens your devices up to spying/tracking/monitoring/hacking/fingerprinting.
Here are some lesser known facts about wired headphones that I wish I had known earlier:
- 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
- The same tap codes are also implemented on hardware buttons (e.g. iPod) - while fast forward and rewind only work for devices iPod Nano 6th or later (iPod Classic 2009 only has next and prev)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
i use an android app called keymapper (by sds100) that lets you remap the volume buttons so that a long press will change the track.
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
Technically TRS only has one ring (Tip Ring Sleeve) and TRRS only has two rings (Tip Ring Ring Sleeve). It does have four separate contacts though, separated by bands.
That's correct... I meant this more visually :-)
The 3.5mm audio jack is pretty close to engineering perfection on the important dimensions: cheap, fast, and good.
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.
Longevity! The headphones I have on me are 15 years old. Batteries degrade quickly, especially in consumer products that does everything in their power to boost the spec sheet but sacrifice longevity.
- no latency. They’re actually usable when playing video games.
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I compared the mic quality of Airpods Pro 2, Airpods 4 ANC (similar), and freebie Apple 3.5mm wired earbuds. The earbuds won. My limited research suggested either 1) compression and transmission take a lot of power, so the Airpods don't do as good of a job as something with a bigger battery can afford to, 2) the mic position is worse, or 3) Bluetooth doesn't have enough bi-directional bandwidth for two good signals.
I tested this and based on my testing it’s (3). The AirPods microphone actually gets (slightly) better in quality if you don’t play something through the speakers while using it. Even then the 3.5mm ones were better tho
4) The Bluetooth standard is just kinda bad. Technically there should be enough bandwidth for better quality audio, but the existing profiles like headset mode drop audio quality down to 8-16 kHz sampling rate in mono, not just for mic but for audio you're listening to as well. It's a huge flaw and it's been bad for decades with seemingly no improvement at all (at least certainly not in a way that could be widespread and commonly used).
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 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.
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.
They have no latency, which is essential for gaming.
> It's old but far from obsolete.
Apple themselves know this. Every MacBook, no matter how few ports it has and how “non-pro” it is, ships with a headphone jack.
I have a AirPods Pro. But I also travel a lot and I have a pair of $60 Beats Flex that have a 12 hour battery life and if they fall out, they just fall around my neck. I also bought a third party pair of double flange ear tips that are better noise cancelling for flights than my AirPods.
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.
> I have a pair of $60 Beats Flex that have a 12 hour battery life and if they fall out, they just fall around my neck.
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.
I agree but stuck with Apple ecosystem. I like the cheap wired lightning headphones they do. The audio quality is acceptable on public transit, they’re cheap enough to lose and the mic is surprisingly good. Weirdly if Apple stopped making these I would jump ship for an Android phone with 3.5mm.
But you have wired earpods, both lightning and usb-3. I cannot be happier with those for my iphone and ipad, resp.
My bad, meant USBC - used to have Lightning
I've yet to find a set of Bluetooth headphones or earbuds that don't have a level of background hiss that I can hear.
Particularly for spoken word, it's annoying and distracting.
Another point you missed, the microphones also have better quality, they don't get all the surrounding noises as most wireless ones.
I actually keep an old pair of (good) noise canceling ear buds for travel. Even with retainers I don't really like using my Bluetooth AirPods on a plane. Aha, located them for an upcoming trip.
Analog formats are clearly inferior to digital ones, but analog speakers are superior to digital ones?
Digital speakers don’t exist. No matter how the signal gets there, the end result is wiggling air in an analog process.
> Wired cans don't need to pair, don't glitch out
Cables can wear out. You can get a wire break.
All good wired headphones and earbuds (“IEMs”) have replaceable cables. And the ones that don’t are super cheap.
I once had a wire break in the cable that goes from the left can to the right can (not the external cable).
When the internal non replaceable battery dies the product dies; that's also one reason to prefer wired over wireless. I wrote product instead of headphones because the principle is applicable to every product whose battery can't be replaced by design. All those discarded single use vapes are a good example of that, and... surprise! All of them actually contain rechargeable cells but no recharging circuitry and port, the reason being that rechargeable Lithium cells are much cheaper than primary non rechargeable ones because of economies of scale. Just another example of greed being so damn efficient at producing e-waste.
Wired headphones are infinitely more durable when good. I had a single pair of Sennheiser HD25II for 16 years now and I use them to run 16km a week, often in the rain.
What annoys me the most is that the industry collectively decided that 3.5mm jacks are obselete, removing the option of using wired headphones, for no(?) good reason. We could at least agree that wired and wireless each have their own pros and cons, but no, we're shoehorned into wireless because corporate decided it. Here, you must use <NEW TECH> simply because we said so! It's just the peak of trend following bullshittery and represents a lot of what is wrong with capitalist society.
> removing the option of using wired headphones
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.
i don't know what i'm doing wrong but my mac has terrible time recognizing any USB-C headphones. First, it takes a while to recognize, then it never switches over by default so i often end up blasting on speakers if i forget that it's oh, USB-C headphones. Same confusion on Zoom. At the same time, Mac's 3.5mm just works, instantly.
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.
Got recommendations for good USB-C wired headphones?
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.
JBL Tune is what I have. I wouldn't call them amazing, but the USB-C connection is super useful. You never pair, you never charge, you can't lose them, and even if you did, they are cheap.
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.
The newer Beyerdynamic models have detachable cables. They sell USB-C cables which i have not used but i am very content with the three out of the four pairs of cans i own by them. The pair i dislike are wireless ones. If you want em for music on the go i'd recommend the DT 700 Pro X.
> that the integrated DAC is yet another component which can break and be basically impossible to replace
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.
> Here, you must use <NEW TECH> simply because we said so!
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.
With the trend of computing devices getting more baseline capable but the functionality/usability not improving at the same rate, I do wonder what the endgame will look like. Will we have a reversion to more efficient, durable designs? Or will we end up with absurdly large computing power in every device to counteract the horrible software rot? Phones with 100+ CPUs? Smart fridges with 1TB RAM? (The latter is kinda scary, imagine rewriting all software in Python - we could easily piss away 1000x hardware performance for no functionality gained.)
Macs overall are only 10% of Apple’s revenue and with 70-80% of those being laptops and the other 20% being split among Mac Mini’s, iMacs and Mac Studios, what does you think are the chances of Apple spending time optimizing iMac sells?
> Macs overall are only 10% of Apple’s revenue
"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.
Apples revenue was $416 billion. Let’s say $41 billion came from Macs and assume 20% of that was from all of the desktops that’s $8.2 billion from iMacs, Mac Studios (more expensive), and Mac Minis (more popular). It’s not too far fetched to estimate about $2 billion from iMac sales or less
What's interesting is that Apple was the one responsible for removing the jack from their phones but they've stubbornly kept them on all their computers.
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.
Because the MacBook isn’t particularly short on space. The MacBook neo appears to have massive blank space blocks where the speakers are.
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.
That hasn't stopped them from periodic stalinist redesigns in an attempt to purge other ports from their machines. But the audio jack always survives.
I'm guessing there are some key "user journeys" for scientific / industrial customer base, that involve using 3.5mm jack for something other than audio signal, and said customers would probably sooner change hardware suppliers than deal with dongles and all the problems of introducing USB into the signal path.
There is an adapter 3.5mm jack to USB-C which works great, so from my perspective there is no option removed.
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.
Can't use a power bank at the same time.
You can with a data splitter. I haven't seen any power banks with that integrated which is a weird miss for an obvious product feature.
> we're shoehorned into wireless because corporate decided it.
You can still buy such phones. You need to take the brand loyalty blinders off first.
It was the solution to the "analog loophole" "problem". The idea of the "loophole" is that the hole must be plugged shut to eliminate piracy.
Not true, since Bluetooth to 3.5mm adapters exist, and they've long given up on full-assing audio DRM anyway.
I also prefer open-back over-the-ears and there just aren't many wireless options for that.
Yep, Bluetooth just sucks. I don't use it for anything, and it's disabled on my phone.
I always try to use wired mouse and keyboard and headset at a PC for this reason. Charging. 0 reason to use wireless.
For mobile devices I can understand it and do use it.
All valid points, but I don’t miss having a tangle of wire in my pocket or that wire failing after a couple of months meaning I have to get a new set of headphones.
I have a set of IEMs that I bought at least 8 years ago, and they still work fine. And the wire is even replaceable, though I haven't needed to do so.
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.
I'm looking for long lasting iems myself -- the bunny ears that I recently bought had the cables die on me pretty fast. What are your recs ?
Anything from Etymotic never failed me. The current ER3 SE has been going for 7 years, and the cable is replaceable (when/if it fails — they're still on the original cable).
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.
I have the Shure SE215 which has a replaceable cable.
I also have a pair of Shure IEMs, some 15-16 years old. They still work great, but I've been through at least 2 cables with them, plus an additional 3rd party Lightning cable. I've then switched to BT and couldn't be happier.
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).
I also have a pair of these and they sound really good. Then I received a pair of the Shure Aonic 4s for Christmas one year and those sound amazing. As an added bonus, the passive noise isolation with proper fitting eartips beats any noise cancellation I've ever seen.
I've replaced wires of my main headphone 2 times over 10+ years. 40 dollars for something I use 8 hours a day, not too bad.
Honestly I don't find these days bluetooth to a mobile device that bad.
However, some of the other devices in my home are absolute crap with bluetooth headphones, particularly my windows desktop and my steam deck.
> However, even a minor inconvenience is still an inconvenience.
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.
>"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"
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
Sentimental sure but there’s also a lot of music that was never properly remastered for digital so the vinyl distribution does in fact sound better.
I live this site - down votes even though it’s 100% true. There are TONS of old recordings that don’t even have masters anymore and the digital versions are ripped from a vinyl copy. There’s entire communities around this.
FWIW, Bluetooth LE Audio [0] solves most of these problems in my experience. Battery life is way better, pairing is almost instant, you can connect to multiple devices simultaneously, the latency is almost imperceptible, etc. The sound quality is still worse than wired, but it's close enough that it doesn't bother me personally.
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...
Just to be clear the parent is still 100% correct that wired headphones: * Do not need charging * Are hard to lose. * Offer better audio * Never glitch out with pairing.
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.
Right, my point was just that "Bluetooth sucks" does not necessarily mean "wireless headphones suck", but since nearly all wireless headphones use Bluetooth Classic (or some proprietary analogue protocol), it can be hard to disentangle the two. But yeah, I agree no matter how good the protocol improvements are, wired is still better for some use cases.
Is BLE the only way for Bluetooth to have multiple connections? 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 reasoned out that the bits were being divided so `quality /= 2` as well. I've only ever done this accidentally so I can't be certain the connection was really over BLE.
Granted, I've only ever done multiple connections on Linux so maybe it's a Linux problem.
> Is BLE the only way for Bluetooth to have multiple connections?
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.
> you can connect to multiple devices simultaneously
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.
I wasn't able to find the answer on that page or with google, does bluetooth LE solve the dogshit quality when using the microphone?
Yes, you can simultaneously use full-quality source and sink (speaker and microphone) streams [0]. And from personal experience, this works exactly as you would expect.
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...
In my experience, it's a significant improvement, but I wouldn't call it a solution. If non-LE drop in quality is like 1/10, with LE it's like 6/10.
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.
> "Too many android phones copied Apple and ditched the venerable audio jack"
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.
I'm one of those person who were extremely pissed. I've stuck with older phones for a long time to avoid the thing.
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.
>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.
Because that small audio jack converter cannot drive my wired headphones, so now it's not a small dongle but another smartphone-sized gadget with usually another rechargeable battery, and at that point I might as well use my laptop as portable music player.
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.
You really cannot see? The experience is vastly inferior: the required dongles have a huge list of annoyances, and you either cannot charge at the same time or have to use an ever more finicky splitting dongle.
Actually, no.
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.
I tried the Apple one for a while but it’s badly shielded and picks up interference a lot. I mean really obvious buzzing sounds if near certain sources of RF. Switched to wired ear buds with a lightning connector and no interference issues. So I’m sad I can’t plug in my high quality headphones or hook up my phone to my mixer when I want without having noise.
I have bought probably two or three dozen different kinds of USB-C adaptors over the past few years, for old USB peripherals, for HDMI and display port, etc. They always last a few months then develop unreliable connectors and begin failing on any computer I try them with unless I baby the exact angle of the cable. There's something about USB-C that makes them particularly vulnerable to strain relief issues. Never had these kind of problems before with anything other than apple magsafe connectors. Certainly not from trusty old analogue jacks.
Curiously, I have had the exact opposite experience. Over the years I tried dozens of earbuds and headphones with a jack connection and all of them after a few months of use started getting unreliable connections unless I kept them at the right angle. The pair which lasted longer without issues costs around 180€ but still started showing problems after 2-3 years, though to be fair I left them almost always plugged in my pc. If I had used them with my phone I would've likely started experiencing connection issues much sooner.
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.
Why would you want to carry around an additional dongle? It's just one more thing which you can forget and which can break.
If they replaced it with a second USB port, not simply removed the jack, there would be far fewer complaints.
Part of it is jack longevity. I've never had a headphone port die on me, but I have multiple old phones with dead lightning or USB-C ports...
I’ve had lots of them break. Sometimes the jack was only attached to the board via solder joints which eventually break from fatigue.
It's just one more thing to buy and lose. I know I own both Apple's lightning-to-3.5mm adapter and the USB-C-to-3.5mm. Right now, I know where my nice big-cans headphones are, but it's not with either adapter. I'm pretty such I know where my cheap wireless buds are. The lightning adapter should live in the same travel pouch, but I'm not 100% sure if it's there because I frequently use those with devices that have a 3.5mm jack, so they might have been separated. I know for a fact my USB-C-to-3.5mm adapter has been separated, and I've not seen it for over a year. I know it's in the house somewhere, so I certainly wouldn't buy another one (especially considering how infrequently I used it before), but I have no idea where it is and so if I did want to use my iPad with my nice headphones, I can't.
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).
Can you charge the ohone while listening on the phone?
I have a splitter but it's pretty niche and probably not the best DAC
I've done that for years and it's a 'tax' for being allowed to use my actual headphones. Every single converter I've used will shit the bed after 6-12 months thanks to shitty cabling, and I've used both the official converters as well as third party ones. Eventually it becomes a fucking pain in the ass when it dies at an inconvenient time.
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.
> With Apple's proclivity for proprietary standards, I'm amazed they (or others) haven't rolled their own wireless audio standard by now.
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.
> Can you imagine Europe's reaction?
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.
That sounds like a way to not get any progress. The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.
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...
As your link shows, even if the IEEE 1394 promoted by Apple was technically superior to USB (mainly because IEEE 1394 had been derived from SCSI), it was killed by patents.
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.
> The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.
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.
How likely is it that that can be avoided if, as in this context, the starting point is the current standard not being that great? It pretty much has to end in 2 different competing standards. Or there can be 2 different flavours of the existing standard which are quite likely to break interoperability and make reusing the name an annoyance rather than a help.
A downside of existing standards is it means it is quite hard to innovate on them.
It really is a damn shame that my Lightning connectors are all dead and useless despite being the empirically better connector because of Vestager's whinging and stupidity across the entire EU mobile ecosystem.
Lightning is not a better connector. It maxed out at USB 2 speeds and I needed separate bespoke adapters and chargers. I can now use standard USB C cords with everything, standard USB C headphones, connect my iPhone to my portable external monitor with the same USB C cable I use for my computer…
And the iPhone supports all of the USB C standards that computers support - audio, video, mass storage, network, keyboard, mice etc
Oh yes, Europe bad, regulation bad. Maybe add some nuance to your thinking.
- [deleted]
> no innovation allowed unless it interoperates with other products that don't exist yet
Products that don't exist yet... so, future innovation? No innovation allowed unless it incentivises and streamlines further innovation? Count me in!
> interoperates with other products that don't exist yet.
Are you claiming no other wireless earphones exist other than apples'??
That would implement Apple's proprietary protocol. He thinks Europe would think Apple is creating a monopoly for themselves for iPhone headphones since no other company could implement the protocol without Apple's approval.
iPhones work with any BT headphones.
But other BT headphone manufacturers wouldn't be able to get the ultra low latency / sound quality / perfect device switching / etc.