Haven’t wired earbuds always sounded better than Bluetooth at the same price point? When I set up my home theater, I first thought to use a Bluetooth transmitter for the audio but it stunk. Quiet sounds constantly dropped out and there was no bass for the subwoofer. Actually using a long aux cable from projector to speaker was night and day.
As for wired earbuds, I can highly recommend JLab as the most durable, and therefore the best for my tastes. Pairs of mine have gone years and through a lot of abuse (dunked in coffee with surprisingly frequency) and still work. I feel like every other brand lasted less than a year for me.
> Haven’t wired earbuds always sounded better than Bluetooth at the same price point?
That's certainly been my experience. What Bluetooth gives in terms of convenience it takes away in terms of audio quality, reliability, and having yet another thing to charge.
Cheap wired headphones are analog bad (speaker elements etc). Cheap bluetooth earbuds are also digital bad (codec, compression, poor radio reception forcing use of fewer bits). Because of the longer history, we're better at making cheap-bad-analog than cheap-bad-digital.
I'd really love for wifi powered consumer audio devices to become a thing.
There's a rapidly growing market space of IP-based AES67 and SMPTE 2110 professional audio (and video) devices, which is really exciting to see. Its almost all wired, usually coupled to high precision PTP timing (which would probably have to be relaxed for wifi use). But it's a compelling, semi-standard, network based way of connecting all sorts of systems.
There's already pretty good support in PipeWire too!
Bluetooth does have a ton of codecs now, and latency has been improved a lot too. But these are all optional specs, none are core. I also don't know what the state of bidirectional communication, headset mode is, whether that is improved or not.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadAs for wired earbuds, I can highly recommend JLab as the most durable, and therefore the best for my tastes. Pairs of mine have gone years and through a lot of abuse (dunked in coffee with surprisingly frequency) and still work. I feel like every other brand lasted less than a year for me.
That's certainly been my experience. What Bluetooth gives in terms of convenience it takes away in terms of audio quality, reliability, and having yet another thing to charge.
There's a rapidly growing market space of IP-based AES67 and SMPTE 2110 professional audio (and video) devices, which is really exciting to see. Its almost all wired, usually coupled to high precision PTP timing (which would probably have to be relaxed for wifi use). But it's a compelling, semi-standard, network based way of connecting all sorts of systems.
There's already pretty good support in PipeWire too!
Qualcomm has been talking about their own proprietary wifi sound system, Snapdragon Sound, for half a decade now. Supposedly something is actually going to be shopping soon, but only one or two phones seem able to support it right now. Qualcomm's gonna Qualcomm! SMDH. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26355868 https://www.engadget.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-sound-wireless-...
Bluetooth does have a ton of codecs now, and latency has been improved a lot too. But these are all optional specs, none are core. I also don't know what the state of bidirectional communication, headset mode is, whether that is improved or not.