[secureleaf]

I might be in the minority here, but wired headphones have always been a disaster for me.

I only buy wireless ones now, even though they're fraught with their own issues. It seems like there's always a tradeoff to be made, specifically regarding quality.

My biggest complaint has been the damage that I've always seem to have done to the headphone jacks of devices that I use. I'm not harsh on my devices, but I do tend to put my phone in my pocket and walk around with headphones on. And if it's not the headphone jack that gets destroyed, it's the cable; I went through ~5 different cables/earbuds when I was using the Shure SE215s.

Bluetooth headphones aren't great either. I have not lost a pair of headphones in years, but I've gone no more than 12 months without purchasing a new pair. This gets expensive when I also want my headphones to have active noise cancelling and sound reasonably good (I don't care about audiophile cans, because I wear my headphones primarily when I'm active). And don't even get me started on a pair that has a good (not even great) mic... I'd love to be able to have a phone conversation when walking through midtown Manhattan.