Before wireless earbuds you were basically kicked off the construction site if someone caught you more than once with wired headphones. Now since they can't really get caught on anything most sites can't police it at all without major arguments.

This means fewer speakers playing the worst music you've ever heard getting drowned out by a big chop saw every 15 seconds

I hate Bluetooth in general because it seems like a security nightmare.

Also wireless headphones are way too overpriced compared to wired

I do not give one single solitary fuck about audio quality it all sounds the same to me. Getting a headphone cable caught on something is infuriating beyond measure, though.

If I'm at home and not working, it's no contest - I plug in some real headphones, open back over-ears preferably.

That said, I've been really liking these wireless Samsung things recently. They are in-ears, so maybe a bit off-topic. These days it seems all I do is eat hot chip, work with loud equipment, and ride the train - so, lots of background noise and over-ears are too cumbersome.

1. I'm getting lucky with this bluetooth stuff. They pair immediately when i open the little case, 100% of the time.
2. These samsung ones just sit in my outer ear and may be the most comfortable headphones I've ever tried. Definitely the most comfortable in-ears. They don't even fall out when I'm running, and the normal silicone-tipped ones always did.
3. They don't sound good, and this is no surprise because the driver is so small and the form factor is so weird. But they sound okay, and on the train no headphones are sounding that much better than these.
4. Cable doesn't get in the way or get caught on things when I'm working, and also maybe it's some sensory thing but I hate how the cable feels running under my shirt. For me this is huge.
5. The battery is not great. Needs charging every day.

At any rate, wired definitely shouldn't be phased out. My new phone has no 3.5mm jack

I'm no audiophile, but the unreliability and fussiness of wireless in general has kept me loyal to the wires. I get secondhand embarrassment watching people try to tame their blue tooth stuff over and over. I also opt for electric over electronic in everything I can, in the name of predictability and repairability.
noooo the motherboard in my $2000 sewing machine burnt out, replacements are out out of stock, and this year's model uses a different board!
haha 70 year old sewing machine I got for $5 at a yard sale go brrrrrr

I hate everything wireless. Non-replaceable batteries, interference and functional trade-offs to save space for said batteries and bluetooth transmitters. For what? Because cables get tangled sometimes? It doesn't look cool? Don't care, cable everything.

It's possible my myopic ass is missing some critical use case that normals have

physical activity. I saw a couple people bouldering with BT earbuds in yesterday. I deadlift listening to music. Some things, wires are a nonstarter.

For portable use, I personally have some Chinese drivers that can be plugged into either a BT adapter or to regular wires. Better sound quality on the bus, better mobility at the gym or working on my car. When the battery dies I can replace just the BT adapter; when the earbuds die I can replace (and upgrade) just the earbuds. 1 replacement of each so far with no issues. I have wired cans for desktop use of course, nothing can beat actual headphones.

My problem with Bluetooth is the complete opposite of yours. I just want something cheap and somewhat reliable that works, and I don't mind low audio quality.

Lots of cheap Bluetooth peripherals get a lot of interference, and you either have to get a whole headset and look like a robbable tourist, or those little thingies and look like a robbable tourist with an added bonus that if one falls off of your ears they're gone forever.

And don't even get me started on having to charge them.

On the other hand, cables are long enough they never annoy me, and even cheap earbuds last forever. It all feels like just a ploy by Big Lithium.

I did not read your long post. Sorry, I’m at work and don’t have time.

Speaking as someone who repairs and builds amplifiers, speakers and all kinds of other stuff and has at least 20 pairs of wired headphones and five Bluetooth pairs:

Have you listened to the apple headphones from an apple device? I used to be able to rattle off the specific codec or pairing protocol and why it tends to sound good, but speaking as the proud owner of an anechoic chamber, they sound pretty good.

That said, my judgement isn’t to be trusted because of years of hearing damage from going to shows. I use test equipment to tell me when it’s right.

A possible solution to your headphones sounding bad is the old loudness contour. People seem to like it a lot.

Edit: I took the time to read through your long post. You should go with apple device and wireless headphones and accept that there is a slight quality difference and when streaming sometimes it’ll drop the bitrate like watching youtube when someone starts torrenting a million Linux isos.

Remember how everyone who had a bmw also bought a Bose system and really enjoyed it because even if it didn’t produce “accurate” sound the combination of electronic and acoustic filters sounded good? Well apple is the new bose. It sounds good and the experience is good and the experience is at least half of listening to music.

Ultimately how much effort are you willing to put in to listen to things in a way that you yourself admitted you might not even be able to hear the difference in quality of? When does it start detracting from the experience?

One of my favorite memories of listening to music is playing records with friends and family on a changer built into an old console. It had an old rock-ola ceramic cartridge, a push pull tube amp, aggressive loudness contour and the records were all pretty dirty. It was wonderful. The sound wasn’t accurate at all and there was audible distortion, but we had a great time and it sounded musical.

It’s okay to not want your yes opus files to sound like they’re being played through an old juke box, but surely there’s a middle ground you’d accept.

I’d suggest you consider what experience you’d like to have first before thinking about the quality of the sound. Think about the knuckleheads with 20k in gear stacked up on a little wire shelf that you always see on audio forums. Do you really wanna live like that? No. You don’t. No one does. That kind of thing is a compromise people who tell themselves they’re on a journey make.

Don’t go on a journey, listen to music instead.

I also refuse to ever buy Bluetooth headphones again, especially a headset. Worse than the sound quality is the mic compression- Bluetooth can't handle 2 full sound channels so your voice will sound like shit. I got these years ago and they've been amazing:

https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-US/p/rs-195/

• replaceable rechargeable AAA. If you forget to charge, just pop a AAA in there
• ear pads cost 10-15 dollars to replace every ~3 years
• RF, not Bluetooth. Noticeably better range
• no fucking BOOWOOP... BEDOOP... noises when momentarily walking out of range. Just cuts in and out naturally and instantly, so you miss a quarter second instead of 2 seconds. -not necessary to use hearing modes, you just hold the main button for a couple seconds and it turns off all that processing and increases the volume

I combine that with either:

• a unidirectional boom mic with gain control, or
• an antlion modmic, which is a fully separate and uncompressed wireless channel for your voice. You can 3m stick or super glue the little magnet to your sennheisers and you have a removable mic

not to mention how disposable they are.

battery dies in a couple of years = dead unrepairable earbuds

My feelings solidifed back in high school when each set of wireless earphones I bought completely died a year before my equivalent wired ones started even having issues, tried it twice and then went back to taping the cable on my wired ones so it stuck in the one position that didnt cut in and out randomly.

If wireless starts becoming wonky theres just jack shit you can do.

I land on the other side of this, I hate wires. I think we can all agree that wires are annoying, and the only reason to use them is because of the quality difference. Edit: I'll correct myself. I agree with the point made about e-waste, and the issue that the drivers are worse to make room for the battery and Bluetooth module.

Wired over-ear headphones are fine for me, because their use case is when I'm stationary and sitting.

Wired earbuds piss me off. Turn the wrong way and they rip out of your ears. You can hear sounds if the wire bumps or brushes anything. The hanging wire adds a slight weight/pull on the ear canal which contributes significantly to discomfort wearing for long time use.

It probably comes down to the use cases which actually happen in my life. I usually need to listen to things when I'm on a walk (podcast/audiobook/YouTube video) which isn't going to have top tier source audio anyway. Or else it's on public transit to block the outside noise. But on a bus, it's cumbersome to have a wire dangling around, in comparison with the convenience of an earbud you can barely feel.

I have good wired over-ear headphones (Shure SRH1540) that I run through a DAC/Amp when I'm home. But I use my Bluetooth earbuds (Soundcore Liberty 4) WAY more often. Sometimes I even forget about the Shures.

I have a cheap set of wireless earbuds. Sound quality is OK I guess. At home I only listen through speakers. At the gym, I can't describe how much more convenient Bluetooth earbuds are. I don't care about sound quality hit, not getting a wire interfering with my lifts is just way better. I used to just not listen to music at the gym because everything was wired.

E-waste though... yeah.

This is correct.

I used to listen to music and podcasts all the time. I wouldn't go out the house without headphones. Or around the house, for that matter. Then manufacturers took the 3.5mm jack out of phones and I had to begrudgingly get Bluetooth headphones.

Pile of shite. Who tf wants yet another thing to charge? And having to leave Bluetooth on, making my phone vulnerable and using excess battery.

Yes, I have a usb-c adapter but I can't afford to fuck the charging port, so that's not a real option.

This makes me realise, that for about 2, maybe 3 years I've listened to very little music, podcasts, anything. That's a very sad thought. The only silver lining is that the capitalist class has lost far, far more in income from not selling me music than they have gained in selling me shit hardware. Sorry for the artists, though.

In fact, that's also about the same time I stopped going on random walks so much: I literally can't be bothered fucking around with these shitty Bluetooth things, if I can ever find them, so I just don't go out unless I have to. Before, I'd go out as an excuse to listen to something. Fuck.

These manufacturers have literally taken the joy out of music. I'm not even that bothered about the quality. A decent pair from a supermarket would be fine for me. In the days of MP3 players and iPod Shuffles, I'd compress every song into a tiny, tiny file to fit more tracks on. I'm going to try to find a wired solution and see if my mood and fitness improve lol.

Anyway, you're 100% right in the post and you're other comments. Never really had a problem with getting the cable caught. It happens, but it's insignificant in comparison to the flaws of wireless headphones. Bluetooth headphones are a solution to a problem that only exists because some fuck exec decided to create a problem to sell to you and keep selling to you a solution. They were inspired by DiCaprio's character in that film with the moving pictures but next to no sound because Bluetooth headphones are as reliable as chocolate saucepans.

For what it's worth, that noise cancelling is probably worth the money on its own - the ability to just block out the sound of the neighbour's kids shrieking

Tell me more? I have expensive noise cancelling headphones (V-Modas) that don't do shit about blocking out kids' shrieking even on the maximum noise cancelling setting. I have to double up on foam earplugs and shooting earmuffs to block those noises out instead, and then I obviously can't listen to anything. I was under the impression that noise cancelling really only works for repetitive background sounds, not sporadic staccato sudden sounds like shrieks.

clumsy

got the Samsung buds pro 2 at half price recently and I kind of like them, but they were a bit underwhelming even at that price. I've never spent a lot on audio in general, so they were actually a big improvement, but there was no "wow" factor or anything. Plus having to install bloatware that asks for all permissions under the sun sucks (why the fuck would a settings menu want to know my location???).

I do think you underestimate how nice the noise cancelation can be though. I moved to a big city and my hick ass cannot deal with all the fucking noise. Plus I'm clumsy and end up getting wires caught on everything, which means wire stuff also becomes e-waste fairly quickly.

Wild. I was thinking about my headphones the other day and wondered how old they are, this post made me look it up and do some math.

According to Amazon I bought my BT 4.40’s in November 2017. I’ve put well over 10,000 hours on them. The battery has definitely reduced but they still last ~12 hours, which initially I was worried about but I specifically bought them because they came with a wire that you can use optionally.

It’s funny I have no doubt that your headphones have sucked because before this pair I had gone through so much junk myself. The 4.40s might be the best money I’ve ever spent and I dread the day I finally have to replace them.

The only odd thing I noticed about them was the sound quality between wired and BT was significant until I got rid of Microsoft’s default BT driver and download some custom one and now they sound identical either way.

I work outside with plants all day, and i used to get cables snagged in things and earbuds ripped out of my ears frequently. Bluetooth has been delightful for letting me safely listen to something at all, but I do lament the terrible sound and janky pairing.