211–220 of 496 posts
Corded earphones: * never run out of juice * never have internal noise/audible hiss * never have trouble connecting * you can hear your vinyl rip FLAC as it is, not subjected to lossy psychoacoustic compression * you can use a variety of devices spanning decades to listen your music on
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Been using 2nd gen AirPods since they came out. Never had any connection reliability issues at all. They switch between my phone and iPad all the time as well. No glitches at all here other than one time I was walking past a large diesel generator. As for gestures, I don’t use them. I usually use Siri, my watch or phone as a control surface. As for snug that depends on the person at the end of the day. I don’t have p…
What about a high traffic place like a NYC subway?
But I don't think it's just Apple's airpods either: Most of the newer bluetooth headphones work and connect almost instantly with my iPhone; I have some Bose QC35 that I can report the same speed of connection of the airpods -- maybe even a little faster. I suspect it's related to some extremely modern bluetooth version or feature-set that might be difficult to discern from the box, but I have not dug into it deeper.
This being said, my airpods sit on my desk next to my Jabra DECT headset: Bluetooth is only almost instant, but DECT is actually instant. I first saw them visiting a cell centre (inside-sales team) team in Seattle, and so I asked about them and learned "we wear this thing making cold calls sometimes every few minutes, all day long, and it doesn't suck" and that pitch sold it for me. I wish it traveled better, because if anything rings (phone, skype, teams, zoom, slack), I pick up the headset and it answers on the computer at the same time, and I'd love (somehow) to have that experience when everything is packed in my rucksack.
The interesting thing is that Chinese companies and fiio are releasing cables and products to turn wired headphones wireless. Kz Az 09 is with looking into. I just ordered a Bluetooth cable that comes with the qcc5141 chip for 40$ and decent iems around 80$ and it will sound better than the best Apple or Sony offerings. Bluetooth 5.2 and newest Aptx adaptive and tws and voice, aac, and ldac just from a cable and can be adapted to whatever iem I want.
Fiio just released the UTWS5 for adapting iems and they have the BTR5 you can plug any headset into and those even support high impedance headphones and can be used as a USB dac.
Bluetooth 5.2 also has a new audio codec LC3. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec)]
All that just to be able to do what regular headphone cables do. There's nothing unexpected about people hanging onto cables. They haven't really been gone, it's weird how a headphone jack is considered a budget feature for phones when cables are the best way to transmit lossless anything.
Cables never left. But the day multiple people can connect to a single Bluetooth source to watch something at the same time, that's when people will care about bluetooth.
In a different world, where hd audio wasn't stuck behind a proprietary codec in the US. There was room fm radio to take the place bluetooth audio has been forced to take.
I personally use an an app to make my headphones wifi capable. Soundwire server listens transmits audio to my android phone 40-50ms latency. I keep wired headphones plugged in at all times. I get the range of wifi. Lossless audio transmission bandwidth is so tiny in the world of wifi, it's a rock solid connection 5 to 6 times further than Bluetooth in residential locations. I once tried it at my university and could leave my laptop at one end of the building and heard it playing in the connected building due to how they set up the network. 802.1x authentication. 400ft away minimum.
I also use viper4android for on device audio equalization on android. PeaceAPO for windows 10.
> For disorganized types, corded headphones are easier to keep track of and needn’t be charged. This is why I've never bought wireless headphones. You don't need to be disorganized to appreciate the convenience of not having to charge yet another device you want to use on the fly. Why would I pay more for something that takes more mental bandwidth to use?
AirPods kinda solved this problem with the wireless charging case. I almost never use them long enough to drain the battery in the headphones before they get put back in the case. At night I put the case on my wireless charging thingy and I don't really ever "think" about charging my AirPods. My wireless headphones I do occasionally have to think about charging, but they are USB-C and mostly I'm using them on my comp…
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AirPods do have a feature where this is supposed to work automatically, without having to pair multiple devices, for all devices on the same iCloud account. It’s nice. I haven’t tried other brand headphones that can pair to multiple devices, so I can’t compare.
The AirPods do an extremely good job at this. It’s just a shame there is no standard for switching across all devices. Although apple makes use of their own servers to coordinate this so it could be difficult.
So now I use them only when I absolutely need to (e.g. in noisy places, taking calls on the move) and avoid them all other times.
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I say "disconnect" but I don't mean that the 802.11 PHY driver of the computer or the base station notices that there's a disconnection. Just that there's a time-correlated burst of packet loss on some/all channels. This might not ever happen to you if you live in a bunker, or on a farmstead at least 500 feet from any neighbours. (Though I wouldn't completely discount the possibility; there's always solar storms.) Bu…
A burst of packet loss that doesn’t translate into at least a disconnection of current TCP streams is, by definition, not a disconnection.
There's a reason IP softphones are always wired, rather than being wi-fi devices — speaking RTP, they can't tolerate the somewhat-normal condition of RF-interference-induced 802.11-PHY packet-loss bursts nearly as well as devices speaking TCP can. They end up dropping calls in about the same way that Bluetooth Audio drops pairing.
(This is also most of why 802.11e QoS Traffic Categories exist — RTP is essentially hard-realtime, so even temporarily queuing RTP packets due to competing high-throughput TCP flows, could be enough to "choke out" the RTP flow.)
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> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. This used to bug me a lot but I've found an easy solution. Just route the wire under your t-shirt or shirt or jacket. When I'm not using my headphones, the headphones hang around my neck. If I feel like taking off my headphones and placing them on…
Do you have a length of slack cable dangling out the bottom of your shirt, like a performer wearing a lavalier mic? If not, then how do retrieve your phone from your pocket in order to change what you're listening to (or just to read something), without the cable yanking your own shirt up?