Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wired headphone sales are exploding

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 752 posts

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#191

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #164
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…

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...

[3]: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/

[4]: https://github.com/bluez/bluez/

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#192

Post by jjav »

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…

> 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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#193

Post by roenxi »

sofixa wrote: post #180
roenxi wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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 the…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#194

Post by aliher1911 »

jmpman wrote: post #14
hurricanepootis wrote: post #6

I bought a pair of IEMs. A while back, the cable broke, and I was able to repair by just buying a new cable. Also, I enjoy not having another device to charge. I recently have been wearing a traditional Casio watch more often instead of my smartwatch.

I love my IEMs but I actually want a Bluetooth version. Heck a dongle that made them act just like AirPod Pros would be my dream gadget.

As other comment suggests, FiiO does adapters like that, also Qudelix. Depends on what you mean by 'like AirPod Pros'. You won't get ANC, mic is so-so I believe and you still have wires, but you get LDAC/aptX HD codec, it can still act as USB DAC if you forgot to charge it, it has very capable DSP EQ that allows loading headphone profiles. I use AirPods Pro as muffs on transit and concerts which is a killer feature for me, but use Qudelix dongle with IEMs for music.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#195

Post by bobthepanda »

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…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#197

Post by atoav »

mcdeltat wrote: post #177
atoav wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#198

Post by bpev »

toast0 wrote: post #70
bpev wrote: post #10

Please let this mean that they'll start bringing back the headphone jacks to phones. usb-c is too unstable, and I prefer not having to deal with charging more devices and with pairing shenanigans when switching devices.

You can get phones with headphone jacks still. You have to shop carefully, because it eliminates a lot of options. My current phone is a moto g stylus 5g 2023... to get a headphone jack, snapdragon cpu, and reasonable cost, I had to also accept a stylus that I only use to fidget. Probably need to start shopping again soon cause updates stop in June.

At this point, I'm mostly just praying that the motorola + grapheneos collab will have a headphone jack. I probably won't purchase anything until I at least see what's cooking over there.

Right now, since I buy audio files anyways, I've mostly been relying on a tiny audio player that can also act as a Bluetooth receiver for my phone.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#199

Post by crote »

MrDresden wrote: post #181
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…

> "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.

Why would you want to carry around an additional dongle? It's just one more thing which you can forget and which can break.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#200

Post by mavhc »

cj wrote: post #168
dijit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

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.

The metric being house fires
Post reply on HN