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by encom 2245 days ago
On the face of it, no wires seem like a good thing, but it brings with it a range of drawbacks.

Compatibility: Bluetooth isn't supported on all devices. And Bluetooth setup and pairing can still be a mess. Analog means round peg goes in round hole and it always works. Sound quality: Bluetooth, as far as I know, still doesn't transmit PCM, so audio is compressed, which may or may not be perceptible to you. Latency: Unavoidable, and may or may not be important to you. Longevity: Wireless means more complexity, and higher price and another battery I need to charge and that will only last N cycles before it dies. Stallman-ity: Wireless headphones run proprietry closed sourced code that you have no control over.
3 comments
mikestew 2245 days ago
On the face of it, no wires seem like a good thing, but it brings with it a range of drawbacks.

Which does not make wireless headphones a "solution to a manufactured problem". You're fine with wires, fine, but others don't have the same use case you do. Your list of drawbacks? There's your "manufactured problems", none of those things matter to me when I'm out for a run.

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AshamedCaptain 2245 days ago
I could argue for example that wires also bring a lot of problems. E.g. cables die, and the connectors tend to wear significantly depending with use.

I am yet to see a TRS 3.5'' connector last me more than a decade. This includes the headphones connectors on expensive TV, and believe me, it is about as annoying to replace a headphone connector on a ~2010 "superglue manufactured" TV as it is to replace a battery on a 2010 "superglue" headset.

Wireless does not have this problem, and batteries I can change (I only buy headsets with replaceable batteries, even when they cost triple or quadruple of "superglue" products).

That said, wired USB-C doesn't have the problem either, and it's also uncompressed PCM to boot.

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jan_Inkepa 2245 days ago
Latency is such a killer for me. Admittedly android phones have bad audio latency anyway IIRC - because of this only iOS has decent music creation software available for it (I don't think my knowledge is out of date here?), so it's more a sin on iOS than Android to not have wired support built-in.
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