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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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This article seems to omit the most important fact about headphones - how do they sound?
I love repairability and all, but it hardly matters if I don't want to use them in the first place because they traded off too much quality for repairability.
I get what you're saying, kind of...
But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here's my take: We've become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they're both "good quality" and therefore I'm satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I've used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded "good."
As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it's extremely harmful to the planet's occupants.
1080p and 4k isn't really a fair comparison for great earbuds and shit earbuds in my opinion. The comparison there is like 4k and 480p. There is a massive difference between the 2. I have had $30 earbuds that you couldn't listen to a podcast on, and I currently have $250+ Bose earbuds that are fucking amazing for just about everything.
Unless of course you're saying that these earbuds are in fact "1080p" quality. In which case, fair point. I have yet to see someone who's actually used these and commented on the sound quality though. What I've seen from fairphone products is they are consumer friendly at the expense of quality.
My wife had some Logitech headphones that for some godforsaken reason were operating in some voice only ultra low bitrate by default. I mean, they weren't fantastic even after I fixed that, but the quality was unbelievably low, like somebody making a phone call from the moon, and how she'd put up with it for nearly a year I'd no idea. I only found out after I noticed her swapping between a wired set for general use and wireless for Discord.
Some Bluetooth controllers can't handle the bandwidth required for sound input and output at the same time unless it's at very low quality, and if Windows suspects such a device is in use, it defaults to the low quality mode as users are more likely to be able to tolerate it than tolerate their headphones not working at all. It's overly cautious, though, and uses the low quality mode far more than it has to.
That's one nice thing I found about Linux, it's pretty easy to change the codec. Just fiddle a bit until it sounds good without static or delays. This is especially important when using multiple Bluetooth devices simultaneously since the Bluetooth chip can only handle so much data.
Maybe Windows has the option, IDK, poke around a bit and see what's available. I couldn't find the option on my work Mac, so I ended up just using wired headphones on my work computer.
It's super quick to swap it on Windows once you know the problem exists and know where to look. You just click the audio icon in the system tray and change the output device in the dropdown from the headset version of the device to the headphones one, and it enables all the higher-bandwidth modes. I'm not sure there's user-accessible control over which specific codec gets used, though.
That's basically what you get on Linux, but there's a third option for a low energy codec.
On macOS, I wanted to use the "headset" mode to hopefully cut down just enough on bandwidth to get rid of choppy playback, but I didn't see an option for it. I have had quality change quite a bit based on the app I'm using (I guess it sometimes gets interpreted as a headset?), so I know it can do it, I just don't know how to control it.
I don't think the writer has them on hand - this is a news article not a review.
Codec support is a bit of a bummer. Otherwise I would have bought them.
Isn't the codec for headphones just meant to handle the communication between the headphones and device while the device can handle transcoding from the input codec to the output codec?
Or do you mean the quality of the codecs supported puts an upper limit on sound quality?
I’m also confused here. I’d have thought that any format decoding would happen on the phone.
Bluetooth does use compression to get higher quality sound out of the relatively low bandwidth (vs what a wire carrying an analog signal can handle, which is continuous in both time and amplitude domains, so effectively infinite sample rate and bit depth, though it's limited by what the DAC can put out as well as what the recording ADC (and/or mixing software) picked up in the first place).
There's a set of codecs in the Bluetooth standard and devices don't have to support every codec in that list (iirc some are proprietary and need to be licensed, plus more support requires more circuitry or firmware if it's decoded by a programmable decoder). I'm guessing that's what they are talking about but asked in case they did mean they thought not seeing mp3 and flac on the list meant they can't listen to songs encoded in those format.
Edit: closed a bracket
Nice lesson, thanks.
Yup, I fiddled with the Bluetooth codecs a bit when I had issues with my headphones, and I got them to sound way better even with other devices using Bluetooth and taking up bandwidth on the chip. This was on Linux, so I'm not sure what options Windows and macOS have for this (I gave up looking on my Mac and now just use wired headphones at work).
Lol sound is not the selling point for any of those pods. Portability is the name of the game
They're not gonna sound as good as real, over ear headphones. But there's still a pretty wide sound quality spectrum for ear buds.
They're almost all small. You're a bit off center too.
They're headphones. They sound ok at best.
What a lame answer. Are you this lame in real life? There's OBVIOUSLY a HUGE spectrum of quality for iems, WHAT are you talking about? It's a valid question on the ops part. You wanted to be snobby but it's just a bad take that reveals how judgdy and smug and completely out of touch you are. Nobody thinks of you as cool, you don't have friends IRL, I hope your dog dies. I hate the internet fuck you you're the straw that broke the camels back. Would be a pretty cool place if people like you weren't in it. I quit
Is— is this a Lemmy copypasta?
Personally I don't really give a fuck about headphones quality unless it's particularly shitty, because if I want quality I'm using one of my headsets (preferably one that doesn't use Bluetooth), but ok.
Also what the fuck is judgy about my personal preferences ? I'm not going to think less of someone because of their choice of audio hardware lmao. And personal preferences are personal. Yes I am a bit anal about the sound quality of my headsets but that is strictly a me problem.
It is probably the completely unnecessary condescending tone of your comment.
Yeah that comment was too concise, which often comes off as condescending according to my friends. Also I used the wrong term because I meant earbuds specifically.
Which is not to say that earbuds all sound bad, it's just that imo, when you're starting to look at (especially Bluetooth) earbuds that sound on par with a good pair of, say 150€ over ear cabled headphones geared for sound quality, imo it's too expensive for something that I'm not gonna use extensively (because I'd much rather use over ear headphones for prolonged use, if only for comfort)
Perhaps we have different definitions of those words. Imo, a headset is over-hear (or on-ear) headphones + mic, like you'd see in a call center. Sometimes they only have a speaker on one side, and they're tuned for speech, not music or general listening.
Headphones, on the other hand, are any kind of speakers you wear on your head. They're usually on ear or over ear since in-ear is typically further distinguished by the term earbuds.
Headphones are usually the better sounding of the three. My Bluetooth headphones (Sony over-ear cans) sound way better than any earbuds I've used, and my wired headphones (AKG cans) are a bit better than that.
I'm not a native English speaker so, yeah, I used the wrong term because I forgot that the word "earbuds" exists. But what I meant is simply that sound quality is not the selling point for earbuds.
If I go for earbuds I want them to have good battery life and be comfortable because I have weirdly shaped ear canals, and I'm only going for "decent" sound because the ones that actually sound on par with a good pair of over ear headphones are like twice the price, at best. Also, yeah, wired is usually my go to for quality. My favorite so far on that front are my ATH M50X but they are not super comfortable for extended use because of my big ass ears so I'm still looking for the holy grail in that price range.
LOL