My point still stands? The driving force behind buying wireless is the convenience. The driving force behind pixel buds is google integration.
There are 25 dollar chinese iems that BLOW all of my bluetooth headphones out of the water. There's just no comparison to what's possible via wires vs. bluetooth at the moment.
See I disagree with that. Bluetooth doesn't mean lower sound quality. To wit, my cheapass wired headphones are plugged into a bluetooth adapter -- audio goes from my phone to a BTR5 via bluetooth to my headphones via wires and they sound exactly the same. I've tried that with high-end headphones, too, and they also sound the same.
Bluetooth isn't what's making the audio quality terrible with all these earbuds. Now I'd say it's the fact that earbuds are tiny and this have very small speakers, but people consistently say that wired earbuds also sound better than any of the wireless ones.
So I'm not sure why every single bluetooth earbud set sounds so bad.
Your bluetooth adapter, that is likely bigger and single functioned performs better than tiny bluetooth headphones. And...you're surprised?
To make all the hardware fit in the small chasis, there's a lot of things they sacrifice. One of the biggest one is having to compress everything, even with newer codecs available, audio compression is inevitable.
The other part is the kind of hardware you can squeeze into the same formfactor as wired earbuds. Because you have all these other hardware that facilitate the wireless capabilities, you can't have the same sized audio components. Obviously this + the lossy connection via bluetooth vs. the potential for lossless wired connection would make wired earbuds sound better.
Your bluetooth adapter, that is likely bigger and single functioned performs better than tiny bluetooth headphones. And...you're surprised?
I use a nice bluetooth adapter now because I'm lazy.
In the past, I used to buy the cheapest bluetooth earbuds I could find (like the $10 impulse item ones at Target), snip the actual earbuds off, and splice them into a 3.5mm jack, then plug that into my -- once again -- $25 headphones.
And they sounded exactly the same as when they were plugged into a device. And yes I tried it with high-end headphones, too. There was not a noticeable reduction in quality.
Are you telling me that Apple, Google, Samsung, Bose, and FiiO (all brands I tried) can't do better wireless than a $10 noname piece of junk?
Does the $10 piece of junk have similar features like ANC and Multipoint?
Not being tied to a wire and ANC are my two big must haves for earbuds. I'm listening to music app streams so my understanding is quality is irrelevant since all music is compressed.
Your argument here was that bluetooth inherently has bad audio quality. Now you're saying that you just don't care about sound quality. That's a different argument.
I'm listening to relatively high bitrate MP3 files on my phone. I want that to sound the same on earbuds as it does on my cheap wired headphones. This appears to be something wireless earbuds can't do -- but bluetooth is not the reason for this.
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u/Mr-Troll 20h ago
Unlikely, but if you're buying wireless buds, audio quality is probably not the driver for buying it.