this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth placing spying Equipment all over my home.
Wireless headphones. So now I'm supposed to recharge my headphones and get worse sound quality for it? In a few years they become e-waste, while good wired headphones can last decades. No thanks.
I agree with everything you've said, but you have to admit that wireless headphones are convenient if you're on the phone with someone and cooking dinner, or doing laundry, for example.
I persisted with my wired earbuds until only very recently picked up some wireless ones and can say theyβre better in every way. Unless you only ever use them while sitting still. Exercising, gardening, mowing the lawn, working on the car or in the garage, anything where youβre moving about really. Not having the stupid wire getting caught on anything or accidentally pulling your phone out is a godsend.
Audio quality is fine for 99.9% of people. I think some people are stuck on views from 5 or 6 years ago. The tech has come a long way.
I find the audio quality to be pretty irrelevant when all I can hear is the bump bump bump of the wires bouncing against me with every step I take!
For me it's the annoyance of having yet another thing that I have to think about what the charge level is at.
They certainly have their place but they can't/don't check all the boxes to replace wired headphones. It's not like having a thin cord running from your ears to your pocket is a big enough issue that having to charge another device before eventually throwing it in the garbage after a couple years is a worth tradeoff.
Bluetooth and nfc audio codecs have gotten so good that unless youβre running high impedance headphones with an amp/dac, wireless is effectively indistinguishable from wired, at least for most applications, and especially if using a mobile device.
Got myself a fiio (IIRC) BT DAC and can't go back. Sound quality sure differs from a phone DAC.
Still got an ass-long cable though lol!
Audio quality wasn't even on my radar since I'm not an audiophile, but them being at parity doesn't sway the argument one way or the other. Good technology typically outpaces the thing it replaces in all aspects. In this case, BT is effectively neutral or worse in many cases which is why I don't feel like it should replace the old method (headphone jack removal) but rather coexist alongside of it. I feel like we're going backwards wheh dongles enter the picture. It gives me flashbacks to the very early days of mainstream cellphones/smartphones and all the proprietary connectors that came with it.
I love wireless headphones because I'm the specific flavor of clumsy that was catching my headphone cable on drawer pulls and doorknobs like 3x a week. I still have good wired headphones I use for serious music listening, but for most day to day stuff I went wireless and they honestly have lasted longer than a lot of my wired earbuds because I am such a shambling disaster.
I fucking oove my anc headphones!
I hate batteries though.
I could see that, though personally, I just put the phone on loudspeaker in those situations. I mostly use headphones for music and general media consumption.
Putting your stuff over speaker has to bother everyone in the house right?
I find that for calling someone the mic quality is unusably poor on Bluetooth, especially when you're washing dishes or doing something else with background noise. I use my wired earbuds connected to my phone in my back pocket so I can still walk around. The built-in mic in the earbuds that came with my phone a few years ago is pretty great.
The only time the wireless ones are more useful than wired is when you're changing your shirt or flipping your head upside down to do your hair or something.
So much this
No smart speakers
It's a mic sitting there waiting for your commands and everything it does I can do myself easier
That's true, smart speakers and wireless gadget are the waste of the century, things factories can't even recicly and that fills the world of trash.
I have good wired headphones (10 years old) and good earbuds (5 years old) and use both. There's a place for each.
You mean, you don't want a 1984-esque always-on listening device in your home?
I use wireless headphones just for watching TV, cable doesn't work well for this use case.
I can't stand the wireless earbuds that you charge in a case or whatever but you'll have to pry my Sony WI-C400 neckband headphones from my cold dead hands.
Yup. I begrudgingly began using wireless headphones beacuse I don't want to have to carry around an adapter to not use them once they killed 3.5mm on phones... Granted I really only use headphones while working out or mowing the lawn or something so it's whatever. Still hate having to worry about having charged headphones, turning on Bluetooth, figuring out if my headphones are off or ok because of the awkward button pushes to turn them off, on or get into connect mode. It's just overly complicated.
I love my Bose wireless headphones (quiet comfort 45). They sound really great, but I also paid $200 (on sale) for them and regret nothing.
The battery is user replaceable with some care.
I have a really nice pair of wired Sonys (MDR-7506) that I modded with a 3.5mm jack, and bought a small BT receiver thatβs strapped to the headband. So I now have the best of both worlds.
I have become so clumsy with the wires, it was less wasteful for me to buy wireless earbuds with wire only between them. The modern codecs are high quality and I only use them outside, so the nuance would be anyway lost.
Smart speakers I do not have. I feel weird talking to devices and I would have to do it in English because they support my native language poorly if at all. I'm not sure if they even are officially available here.
Everything unnecessarily connected to the Internet should have this on them, because they have very little security auditing and all support is dropped very early on the lifetime of the appliance. https://kissa.depili.fi/internet_asbestos_52x32_cmyk.pdf
I tend to avoid any wireless peripherals, I still have a wired mouse because I don't need to think about charging my mouse and whether it's going to run out of charge.
Wireless mice are such a weird one to me. Like your mouse will never move more then a foot away from it's normal spot so why do you need wireless?
Wires get in the way of the rest of the clutter on my desk.
I agree with all of that. Also, wireless headphones discharge when not in use, there's no way to turn them OFF, in standby they deplete the batteries in a few days. If not used very frequently, like every day, they are never ready to use, they must be charged. There's nothing like good wired headphones, in my case as I have an LG V20 which has a really good hi-fi dac that drives every wired headphones I plug in, going bluetooth is a huge downgrade in sound quality.