Worse quality, latency, potential to lose one (or both) earbuds, having to faff with batteries and charging and cases (and charging the charging case) when I can just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears. The knotting is a small price to pay for the improved quality and convenience in every other way.

What's wrong with analogue audio?

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anonymars 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Something I read recently which I think is interesting food for thought:

Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?

Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators

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sjsdaiuasgdia 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My own memory and current experience on this point is that it used to be far more common than it is today.

I remembered there was a South Park episode where Cartman was being a stereotypical self-absorbed person walking around with their phone on speaker. I looked it up, and that episode came out in 2013. At the time, most phones on the market had a 3.5mm jack. Yet people not using headphones/headsets was an experience common enough to be turned into a joke in the show.

I don't think there's much correlation between 3.5mm jack availability and using a phone's speaker output in public.

"Simple" as you've used it is open to interpretation. I personally held on to wired headsets longer than most of my friends and family. You know what I don't miss, now that I've preferred wireless for a few years? Untangling the cable. Accidentally catching the cable on something and having an earbud ripped out. Picking lint out of the jack. Staying conscious of the length and positioning of the cable in the context of my own movements.

Other than the BT connection process, which is only complicated if you're fortunate enough to own multiple devices and headphones/sets to connect to them, wireless can be a lot "simpler" in actual usage.

	▲	anonymars 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I appreciate the counterpoint. The Cartman example is a good one. Also it's probably difficult to factor out the seemingly broken post-Covid social norms One point I'll make is simplicity comes in many forms. Wired headphones can be dirt-cheap, they don't run out of battery, and I don't think they're as prone to getting lost

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Lvl999Noob 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My 2c.

The risk of losing one (or both) earbud is a real one. My ears don't tend to keep snug grip on the earbuds so they tend to get loose after I walk a little. With earbuds, this might just be my own singular piece but, there is also the chance that only one of the two would connect to your phone.

On the other hand, the cables get tangled together. I can't walk around with them because the cable gets stuck in the swing of my arms. Connecting them to the phone after a call had already started was a piece of cake though. With bluetooth, I never have my earbuds on when I actually need them and it's too much of a pain to take them out of my bag and connect them.

Whenever it is time to replace my current earbuds, I am gonna go for a neckband instead. It has basically the best of both, imo (I am not that sensitive to audio quality mostly) and the downsides aren't large enough (I'll think of the weight as a neck workout).

	▲	raw_anon_1111 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Then don’t buy headphones like that. I have AirPods Pro. But I also have a pair of $50 Beat Flex that if they fall out of my ear they just go around my neck. I use them when I travel. I bought a pair of double flange doohickies to replace the standard ones.

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ianburrell 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LE Audio should fix the quality and latency problems. The latency is significantly lower and the bandwidth is twice Classic Bluetooth. There are new default codecs that are better, and there should be enough bandwidth for lossless. The other nice thing is enough bandwidth for bidirectional streams instead of low quality audio when use microphone.

The current problem is that LE Audio implementations are new with lots of headphones having them as beta.

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compass_copium 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Shouldn't it be the same thing? You either have the DAC on your phone convert the digital music file to an analog signal and send it over the aux cord to the speakers in the headphones, or have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right? It's not like you're plugging your headphones into a record player.

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delta_p_delta_x 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> have the digital file sent over Bluetooth and converted by a DAC in the headphones, right

This is not how Bluetooth wireless audio works. PCM audio is re-encoded on-device into any one of a few Bluetooth-capable codecs that is then streamed to the client device. This is a primary cause of latency.

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	▲	compass_copium 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Interesting, thanks