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Wired headphone sales are exploding

bbc.com

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Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#141

Post by PowerElectronix »

adrithmetiqa wrote: post #111

Many pro wired comments here about quality which can be classed under the category “most people cannot tell the difference”. You simply cannot compare the considerably greater convenience of wireless to wired when on the go. Also, any decent wireless over the ear headset allows for wired use when out of battery. That’s hardly a game changer

You can have low quality, low cost and very portable wired headphones, as well.

You can also go for moderately priced cans and just feel your ears tingling the first time you listen to something through them.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#142

Post by kelnos »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #79
healsdata wrote: post #2

My wired headphones never run out of battery. They also don't drop the connection if my pocket is at the wrong angle from my ears.

All that and they cost a fraction of the price! Wireless headphones are a strictly inferior product to wired, and it astonishes me that Apple convinced anyone to buy them. They're a total rip off.

It's weird, because I absolutely agree in principle, but 90% of my headphone use is wireless now.

And I hate it: latency, glitches, randomly just deciding not to connect anymore, deciding to connect in the lower-quality headset mode when I want to listen to music, and refusing to switch to the high-quality mode, battery running out at inconvenient times, the cat knocking them off my nightstand and under the bed where I cant reach them. So many reasons to be annoyed by them!

But I hardly ever take out my wired headphones anymore, and I'm not sure why. Back when I got my first phone without a 3.5mm jack, I just kept a little USB-C adapter in the little pouch/case that held my wired IEMs, and it was fine. But at some point I bought a new phone, and there was a deal on cheap (or free?) wireless earbuds with it, and I really just stopped using wired headphones for the most part since then, even though the wireless ones really annoy me for so many reasons.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#143

Post by qilo »

jhbadger wrote: post #139

Maybe I am just old, but I have absolutely no idea what this passage is about -- why would people be fiddling with Bluetooth on a date and why would it cause them to forget their network? >"Bluetooth does not work," Kravitz said in a recent interview, and it's not just headphones, but Bluetooth connections in general. "It's ruining important moments. Imagine the amount of times that you're with someone on a date, you…

I found this confusing as well. She probably meant to "Forget" the device when the Bluetooth pairing with the headphones is lost.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#144

Post by shrx »

userbinator wrote: post #125

The elephant in the room is "chi-fi". There's been a huge growth in small Chinese companies with unusual names making amazingly cheap, yet great-sounding over-ear headphones, IEMs, and earbuds within the past few years, and the vast majority of these are wired.

Can you recommend some brands with good quality over-ear headphones?

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#145

Post by antonkochubey »

jhbadger wrote: post #139

Maybe I am just old, but I have absolutely no idea what this passage is about -- why would people be fiddling with Bluetooth on a date and why would it cause them to forget their network? >"Bluetooth does not work," Kravitz said in a recent interview, and it's not just headphones, but Bluetooth connections in general. "It's ruining important moments. Imagine the amount of times that you're with someone on a date, you…

Picnic date with a Bluetooth speaker for some background music, perhaps? I often see that in parks/beaches/etc, and as long as volume is reasonable I don’t think anyone minds.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#146

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

blululu wrote: post #94
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fla…

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 adva…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#147

Post by omnimus »

One segment I wish came back are bluetooth inear headphones wired together (untrue wireless, i guess).

There are some models but none really explore their possible advantages (battery, ux, single signal source).

I lost single wireless earpiece multiple times making the rest useless. This won't happen with wire. With wire its also so much easier and quicker to take them off they will just hang around your neck. There is reason why many workers in loud environments prefer earplugs wired together.

My impression is that apple hyped the airpods so well that people forgot about other possibilities. And when Google included cool headphones with cables people thought they have to cut them… that was when industry decided its dead segment.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#148

Post by zarzavat »

adrithmetiqa wrote: post #111

Many pro wired comments here about quality which can be classed under the category “most people cannot tell the difference”. You simply cannot compare the considerably greater convenience of wireless to wired when on the go. Also, any decent wireless over the ear headset allows for wired use when out of battery. That’s hardly a game changer

Not everybody is using their headphones on the go. 99% of my headphone use is at my desk while I work. Wired is more convenient than wireless since it's one less lithium battery to charge.

It's true that humans are not particularly sensitive to audio quality, but they are very sensitive to audio latency. If all you do is listen to buffered audio sources then latency is not important but the moment you need to use your headphones in an input loop then wired is the superior technology as it offers close to zero variance in latency.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#149

Post by mcdeltat »

beloch wrote: post #83

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 a…

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 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.
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