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Wired headphone sales are exploding

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271–280 of 752 posts

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#271
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…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#272
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll never happen but I'd love to see a new analog audio connector designed with portable audio and extreme durability in mind make a debut. The old 1.44mm connector is nice for its ubiquitous nature, but its internal footprint is large and it's prone to contact issues over time (I'm sure most of us have had a device/headphone pair where the jack had to be rotated into a "sweet spot". I'm not well versed in the worl…

What’s 1.44 mm connector in this context? Common sizes for headphones are 2.5, 3.5 and (lately) 4.4 mm

Since you mentioned 4.4mm, thought I would chime in and mention pentaconn (the trade name) which is a TRRRS connection (which does include a ground connection as well as L+/L-/R+/R-. I still do not understand the purpose of the ground connection in these plugs since there's nothing to ground on the other end.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#273
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…

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…

> 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".

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#274
post #84

I'm the trendsetter. I've never stopped using wired headphones and, after being made fun of for years despite much better audio quality, cost, simplicity and reliability, the rich finally decided to imitate me. Never let go of your convictions!

Amen! This is the way. Many beautiful women have approached me finally! It shows that staying sane pays off.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#275
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…

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…

> 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

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#276
I started seeing this trend nearly a year go in Seoul. I think it is just a sort of fashion trend. I like wired experience when I am alone in a silent place listening to classical or instrumental music. But it’s hard to beat convenience of Bluetooth elsewhere.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#277
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…

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…

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.

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#279

I started seeing this trend nearly a year go in Seoul. I think it is just a sort of fashion trend. I like wired experience when I am alone in a silent place listening to classical or instrumental music. But it’s hard to beat convenience of Bluetooth elsewhere.

I find them the opposite of convenient ("where are they? are they charged? are they paired? did they lose pairing? did I just pair to my downstairs neighbor's TV? did he just pair to mine?")

Re: Wired headphone sales are exploding

#280
post #33

While using wired headphones, my spouse's car never steals my audio when it starts or pulls into the driveway. Also, I can join a meeting seconds before it starts without spending a few minutes scrambling to verify that my BT headset will allow me to hear/be heard.

A good bluetooth experience requires that both the headset and the audio source device implement bluetooth well, which is hard. That said, I have zero problems with my AirPods Pro pairing with my Mac or iPhone ever, it's pretty nice.

it requires that you only have a single pair of headphones, and a single device capable of connecting to it.

with my bluetooth headphones, every time I use them in my house it's a hunt. First find my phone and disconnect them on it since thats what connected automatically. Then, go to the tv and disable bluetooth since that was the second thing it connected to. Then put the headphones in the case and back since they won't pair for some reason. Then go to settings in my PC. Realize my PC connected to my speakers, disconnect them, then connect to the headphones.

Someone then calls me on the phone, I pick up and their voice comes booming from the speakers.

Bluetooth would be infinitely better if it didn't connect automatically. Just press a button on the device you want to use. Instead it connects to everything but the thing I want to use.

Recently I bought some cheap $10 wired Sony earbuds. I was surprised they sound much better than my $150 bluetooth earbuds.

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