7 ms·

Ugh, no. Those considerations are fine for people who are like you. Some of us have different considerations and we're sick of being run over by these convenie

by tomc1985 8y ago

Ugh, no. Those considerations are fine for people who are like you. Some of us have different considerations and we're sick of being run over by these convenience freaks To all the downvoters, these are some reasons: * Low latency applications * Existing high-end hardware one may own (old Sennheisers mop the floor with a pair of "high end" Beats) * same port in use everywhere for past 50 years, there are a ridiculous amount of products for it * Ability to connect a non-USB headphone amp * Everybody understands it * No need to charge your headphones(!) * No stupidly expensive tech to license to make something as simple and dumb as headphones * No stupidly complicated tech to master to make something as simple and dumb as headphones * WHY would you put logic and circuitry in a simple mechanical device?? Do manufacturers just LOVE skyrocketing costs? * Do any of these guys value simplicity in design any more? Or is tech charging full-steam into unnecessary complexity? And on the subject of wireless standards: * Other 2.4ghz wireless standards have way better range. (I used to work in a large factory-type building with literally thousands of consumer printers all turned and broadcasting their individualized ad-hoc 802.11 signals. We would have chronic issues with the Wi-Fi (on account of thousands of networks) and I could be on the other side of the building with my headphones and still get clear audio. (Oftentimes it would cut out depending on location but the range I saw was a good 3x what I could get with bluetooth) * * * C'mon this is like 100-year-old tech that everyone understands and loves, EXCEPT for the cable. Way for the technology makers to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so that they can sell you their crap all over again.

TheJoYo 8y ago
I have high end sennheisers and airbuds. The only time I pull out my sennheisers is when im doing recording or live sampling. Bluetooth is opensource, it's not overly complicated it's just new to you. This technology was already being used in live performances with no one complaining.
- userbinator 8y ago
  it's not overly complicated it's just new to you Download the Bluetooth specification and try to read it. How is that not "overly complicated" compared to three copper wires?
  - TheJoYo 8y ago
    Specifications are used to reference in conjunction with an implementation. There are many specifications I could point to that would overwhelm most engineers yet they use those standards just fine.
    - userbinator 8y ago
      The point I'm making is that it is a very complex standard whose use-case goes far beyond carrying audio from a device on a person to the headphones in his/her ears. To give another example, GSM is also a very complicated standard (or more precisely, set of standards) but no one would really advocate for all landlines in buildings to be replaced with non-mobile GSM phones attached to the wall.
      - derefr 8y ago
        ISDN and SIP are complicated standards, but telecom engineers do advocate to their customers, whenever possible, to drop POTS in favour of VoIP softphone service run over the same lines. VoIP-over-ISDN solutions are far easier to wire a large building for (it's just the existing ethernet drops, coming from the same switches the building already has, now carrying an additional VLAN); it removes many potential sources of interference; it increases voice quality; and it's just plain easier to deliver. All that despite being, in pretty much every way, "more complicated."
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      Bluetooth is definitely not one of those "uses those standards just fine" cases... if a user has just a dozen peripherals, a even a 99% success rate starts failing on you pretty often On a more personal note, I have to keep a mental map of which bluetooth devices will work with which bluetooth receivers... the tech is not NEARLY as universal as people like to think it is. Generally speaking, devices of the same vintage (or make) will talk to each other, but it is a crapshoot as to whether my a v2 headset will talk to a v4 USB receiver, or be seen by a new laptop/ipad/whatever.
  - 13of40 8y ago
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > This technology was already being used in live performances with no one complaining. nah, in live situation it's 99% FM radio used for transmission
  - archagon 8y ago
    Yeah, BT is literally impossible to use live. Every ms counts, and here we’re on the order of 50-150. Even native drivers often aren’t good enough for wired equipment, forcing users to upgrade to ASIO drivers! I know I couldn't use my guitar interface or keyboard without them during my Windows days, though the situation is admittedly much improved on the macOS side.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dfox 8y ago
      Another thing is that primary thing you want to do wirelessly in live situation are mics and maybe instruments. That implies relative large dynamic range on input (certainly more than 16b samples), which is hard to do digitally in sane way.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  Bluetooth's implementation complexity contributes to the high cost of its peripherals Also (at least for Sennheiser) the non-bluetooth (2.4ghz) wireless headphones are pretty stellar. Personally I prefer that approach over Bluetooth
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    I bought a decent set of Bluetooth Anker earbuds for £14. Better sound than the last set of wired earbuds that I got for £20. I still use an iPhone 6S, but I’m not going back to wired headphones.
- vuln 8y ago
  "not overly complicated" seems like the security aspect is since most companies glance over it.
- smolder 8y ago
  Can you cite examples of people using Bluetooth in live performances? 20ms is intolerable for a band playing live together. Any hickups in signal for a major performance would also obviously be a problem.
codethief 8y ago
Add to this the fact that, in practice, you can't really listen to high-res audio over Bluetooth. (I am aware that audio quality has gotten better over time but you still rely on the specs of the Bluetooth chip on both sides which, in practice, usually means that you're still far away from lossless transmission.)
- philjohn 8y ago
  Realistically, you're already listening to audio that has been through lossy compression, and if you look at the AirPods they send the AAC bitstream over bluetooth, so what you hear out of the other end is exactly what you'd hear with a pair of headphones plugged into a jack.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Unless you're playing FLAC files.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    The LAST thing I'd want is my mp3 data to be re-encoded as AAC. Double compression is bad, mmkay? Also, as the other comment alludes to, many people have large libraries of FLAC (or other lossless format) music, and we've invested in the hardware required to play these files back faithfully Not to mention all those old dinosaurs with CD and vinyl collections ;)
    - philjohn 8y ago
      And yet, for their common customer, their music is either purchased from iTunes, ripped through iTunes (to AAC) or streamed. It sucks, but people with huge FLAC libraries are the outliers, not the mainstream, and it's only sensible that Apple concentrate their resources on their largest market.
      - KingMob 8y ago
        Except that they created that market out of thin air. It's great for Apple to sell wireless gear, but they could have left the jack in, no problem, if it weren't a money grab.
simonh 8y ago
And for the small percentage of people who care about these things, use the included adapter. As for me, I’ve had the earphone jacks in two if my iPhones go wonky on me. I fully realise few other people have this problem and it’s almost certainly down to me being a bit careless inserting and remove the jack, but still it happens. So I just got a set of lighting earbuds. Never had a problem since. It seems to be a much more robust and reliable connector. So on two of my phones with headphone sockets, I ended up not using them anyway.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  I wish there was an adapter let me plug lightning headphones into my macbook. The current incompatibility between apple devices means carrying two sets of wired headphones, or ditching the packed in lightning headphones.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    Or by getting wireless ones...
philjohn 8y ago
Then use the dongle ... it was free on the iPhone 7 and is $9 to buy another one if it gives out over a year after purchase.
- BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
  Can't use the dongle while charging. Apple doesn't make a dongle for both 3.5mm and power. They do sell one from Belkin. It's $35 and pretty bulky.
  - philjohn 8y ago
    That is true, and one downside, but I would wager a lot of people don't have headphones plugged in for the entire day, and even then, you get what, 10 hours music playback on an iPhone these days?
    - veridies 8y ago
      I plug my iPhone into speakers every night to listen to music. I could connect over AirPlay, but that’s really unreliable everywhere else I’ve set it up.
      - philjohn 8y ago
        That's odd - I've never had issues with AirPlay, but now have a whole house Sonos setup which I use instead. Have you tried AirPlay 2?
        veridies 8y ago
        I don't think so; I set up all my sound stuff before AirPlay 2 was out. I have an Airport base station with two different receivers (one Sony, one Denon), an Airport Express, and a Raspberry Pi running Runeaudio, each of which is connected to its own pair of speakers (or, in the case of one of the receivers, a surround setup). When I stream (from either iTunes on my MacBook or my iPhone) to any one of those, the music will have pretty frequent interruptions; it really shouldn't, either, because my MacBook is typically about five meters away from the Airport Express in the same room. The problem is significantly lessened when I play MP3 music instead of ALAC, and significantly worsened when I play 24-bit audio files, which suggests that bandwidth may be the problem.
pishpash 8y ago
The trend is not so much driven by wanting unnecessary complexity (but that is the result), as by the desire to remove physical interfaces to machines. Optimistically this is just some haughty designer's prematurely executed ideal of human-machine symbiosis; pessimistically this is the transfer of means of user control over machines to the corporation, allowing external control over machines and thereby users.
whalesalad 8y ago
You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices. I feel like you’re kinda grumpy here for no reason? You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware? You’d actually want a usb dac/amp in that situation. (Which you claim is a negative) “Sick of being run over by convenience freaks” sorry to say it bud... but you’re the “freak” here (in the sense that you are the extreme of the extreme, don’t mean that in a derogatory way) You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  > You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices. I use sennheiser headphones with my smart phone on a regular basis. > You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware? Because that's what is there, convenience trumps quality in many situations. > You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream. On what do you base this? The article itself shows that the majority of headphone purchases are not bluetooth. It seems like the 'mainstream' uses headphone jacks.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  "on-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware?" Well, the cool thing about flexibility is that I can do that if I want to, and it will still work if I don't. Yes the amps in phone headphone ports are crap but as long as you're aren't trying to walk around with $500+ cans with crazy high resistance everything still works fine. And as for the mainstream, you really have to step back and think about all the people in this world with audio players... first world and third, high and low tech, city slickers and country folk, blah blah blah. What port do the majority of those devices have?
hannasanarion 8y ago
So you're totally fine with carrying around an external hardware amp, but a dongle for it is intolerably inconvenient?
- KingMob 8y ago
  What external hardware amp are you referring to? Bluetooth headphones have an amp, not wired headphones. And the phones themselves will continue to have an amp as long as they have speakers.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    I was responding directly to the person above me who objected to the loss of the 2.5mm jack because he can't plug his amp into his phone anymore. This seems silly to me, because if using fancy headphones is important enough to you to carry around an amp, it is negligible additional cost to also carry around a dongle.
agitator 8y ago
I mean if you prefer old technology, that's all good. No one is stopping you from using your old headphones with your old phone. The convenience of not having to untangle headphones, not accidentally yanking them out of a device when walking away, or being able to exercise with a device sitting somewhere else in the room is a welcome innovation IMO. Yes, apple forced people's hand with removing the port (They aren't making these products for fun) to make money, but when has a business made bold moves if it didn't mean making money in the long run? When apple started removing ports, I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones.
- blahedo 8y ago
  > ...I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones. This reads as: "What's your problem? I have lots of money, so I can afford this." When people talk about classism and privilege in the tech industry, this is the sort of thing they mean. Nobody claimed that bluetooth headsets aren't better in some situations—but their benefits are not necessarily in areas that interest everyone. "Forcing people's hand" to buy the more expensive but unneeded thing is precisely what the OP is complaining about, and your post does not address that argument even a little bit.
  - agitator 8y ago
    I agree my comment does sound brash, which wasn't my intention. But what I meant was, apple is selling products, and trying to maximize it's profits. If you don't like the feeling of manipulation, you don't need to buy into it. Marketting, social pressure, device ecosystems, they are all strategies that get you to buy, and keep buying. And I implicitly did address the OP's comment, in that I agree. They are forcing people's hands, it sucks. But if you are going to buy into it, you might also recognize that other's will buy into it and try to make profit for yourself by owning a portion of the company. I was in no way implying that I'm rich. I was implying that you can play the game too if you want. What do you think will happen as AI continues to develop? Either you sit idly complaining about robots taking your jobs, or you start trying to gain part ownership of the companies that will build those robots. You have to be proactive because companies don't give a sh*t about your wellbeing, they have no incentive to do so.
kminehart 8y ago
Another thing that is really obnoxious is how there is now an inconsistency with how it's implemented. Some phones use a pass-through system so USB-C headphones connect directly to the phone's amplifier / DAC (digital-to-analog converter); other cables might contain a DAC / amp themselves, while the last small percentage just transfer a digital signal. Phones with speakers already have a dedicated DAC and amp. The headphone jack was just a way to interface with the amplifier. Manufacturers turned a small size issue into a giant consistency problem that didn't need to exist.
gambiting 8y ago
I work in a games studio, where I have dozens of PCs, consoles and their controllers running all the time around me in close proximity - my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal. If I as much as wave my hand in between the headphones and the phone, the signal is gone, they start stuttering like crazy. Bluetooth is absolute trash for audio transmission, I have no idea who though it would be a good idea to share the same frequency with other 2.4GHz devices for something so sensitive as audio.
- vardump 8y ago
  > my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal. I had the same exact problem. Turned out to be a crappy bluetooth chip on the PC side, despite being a Bluetooth Class 1 device, rated for 100m range. With a new bluetooth USB dongle, it even sometimes works between floors without drop outs (!). Of course it might also be a manufacturing error in your headphones, extremely radio noisy environment, but never forget to check it's not simply faulty hardware.
Insanity 8y ago
I entirely agree with you. Plus, I don't feel like the cable is all that inconvenient anyway. I got high-end headphones (And low-end earphones for when working out) and the cable has never been an issue to me. Yes, maybe the wires tangle on the earphones, and then you untangle them. Plus, for high-end gear I find that I don't move about with it a lot, so the wires are pretty much always in a similar position on my desk and don't create any problems either.

TheJoYo 8y ago

I have high end sennheisers and airbuds. The only time I pull out my sennheisers is when im doing recording or live sampling. Bluetooth is opensource, it's not overly complicated it's just new to you. This technology was already being used in live performances with no one complaining.

userbinator 8y ago
it's not overly complicated it's just new to you Download the Bluetooth specification and try to read it. How is that not "overly complicated" compared to three copper wires?
- TheJoYo 8y ago
  Specifications are used to reference in conjunction with an implementation. There are many specifications I could point to that would overwhelm most engineers yet they use those standards just fine.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    The point I'm making is that it is a very complex standard whose use-case goes far beyond carrying audio from a device on a person to the headphones in his/her ears. To give another example, GSM is also a very complicated standard (or more precisely, set of standards) but no one would really advocate for all landlines in buildings to be replaced with non-mobile GSM phones attached to the wall.
    - derefr 8y ago
      ISDN and SIP are complicated standards, but telecom engineers do advocate to their customers, whenever possible, to drop POTS in favour of VoIP softphone service run over the same lines. VoIP-over-ISDN solutions are far easier to wire a large building for (it's just the existing ethernet drops, coming from the same switches the building already has, now carrying an additional VLAN); it removes many potential sources of interference; it increases voice quality; and it's just plain easier to deliver. All that despite being, in pretty much every way, "more complicated."
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    Bluetooth is definitely not one of those "uses those standards just fine" cases... if a user has just a dozen peripherals, a even a 99% success rate starts failing on you pretty often On a more personal note, I have to keep a mental map of which bluetooth devices will work with which bluetooth receivers... the tech is not NEARLY as universal as people like to think it is. Generally speaking, devices of the same vintage (or make) will talk to each other, but it is a crapshoot as to whether my a v2 headset will talk to a v4 USB receiver, or be seen by a new laptop/ipad/whatever.
- 13of40 8y ago
jcelerier 8y ago
> This technology was already being used in live performances with no one complaining. nah, in live situation it's 99% FM radio used for transmission
- archagon 8y ago
  Yeah, BT is literally impossible to use live. Every ms counts, and here we’re on the order of 50-150. Even native drivers often aren’t good enough for wired equipment, forcing users to upgrade to ASIO drivers! I know I couldn't use my guitar interface or keyboard without them during my Windows days, though the situation is admittedly much improved on the macOS side.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dfox 8y ago
    Another thing is that primary thing you want to do wirelessly in live situation are mics and maybe instruments. That implies relative large dynamic range on input (certainly more than 16b samples), which is hard to do digitally in sane way.
tomc1985 8y ago
Bluetooth's implementation complexity contributes to the high cost of its peripherals Also (at least for Sennheiser) the non-bluetooth (2.4ghz) wireless headphones are pretty stellar. Personally I prefer that approach over Bluetooth
- mattkevan 8y ago
  I bought a decent set of Bluetooth Anker earbuds for £14. Better sound than the last set of wired earbuds that I got for £20. I still use an iPhone 6S, but I’m not going back to wired headphones.
vuln 8y ago
"not overly complicated" seems like the security aspect is since most companies glance over it.
smolder 8y ago
Can you cite examples of people using Bluetooth in live performances? 20ms is intolerable for a band playing live together. Any hickups in signal for a major performance would also obviously be a problem.

codethief 8y ago

Add to this the fact that, in practice, you can't really listen to high-res audio over Bluetooth. (I am aware that audio quality has gotten better over time but you still rely on the specs of the Bluetooth chip on both sides which, in practice, usually means that you're still far away from lossless transmission.)

philjohn 8y ago
Realistically, you're already listening to audio that has been through lossy compression, and if you look at the AirPods they send the AAC bitstream over bluetooth, so what you hear out of the other end is exactly what you'd hear with a pair of headphones plugged into a jack.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Unless you're playing FLAC files.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  The LAST thing I'd want is my mp3 data to be re-encoded as AAC. Double compression is bad, mmkay? Also, as the other comment alludes to, many people have large libraries of FLAC (or other lossless format) music, and we've invested in the hardware required to play these files back faithfully Not to mention all those old dinosaurs with CD and vinyl collections ;)
  - philjohn 8y ago
    And yet, for their common customer, their music is either purchased from iTunes, ripped through iTunes (to AAC) or streamed. It sucks, but people with huge FLAC libraries are the outliers, not the mainstream, and it's only sensible that Apple concentrate their resources on their largest market.
    - KingMob 8y ago
      Except that they created that market out of thin air. It's great for Apple to sell wireless gear, but they could have left the jack in, no problem, if it weren't a money grab.

simonh 8y ago

And for the small percentage of people who care about these things, use the included adapter. As for me, I’ve had the earphone jacks in two if my iPhones go wonky on me. I fully realise few other people have this problem and it’s almost certainly down to me being a bit careless inserting and remove the jack, but still it happens. So I just got a set of lighting earbuds. Never had a problem since. It seems to be a much more robust and reliable connector. So on two of my phones with headphone sockets, I ended up not using them anyway.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
I wish there was an adapter let me plug lightning headphones into my macbook. The current incompatibility between apple devices means carrying two sets of wired headphones, or ditching the packed in lightning headphones.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Or by getting wireless ones...

philjohn 8y ago

Then use the dongle ... it was free on the iPhone 7 and is $9 to buy another one if it gives out over a year after purchase.

BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
Can't use the dongle while charging. Apple doesn't make a dongle for both 3.5mm and power. They do sell one from Belkin. It's $35 and pretty bulky.
- philjohn 8y ago
  That is true, and one downside, but I would wager a lot of people don't have headphones plugged in for the entire day, and even then, you get what, 10 hours music playback on an iPhone these days?
  - veridies 8y ago
    I plug my iPhone into speakers every night to listen to music. I could connect over AirPlay, but that’s really unreliable everywhere else I’ve set it up.
    - philjohn 8y ago
      That's odd - I've never had issues with AirPlay, but now have a whole house Sonos setup which I use instead. Have you tried AirPlay 2?
      - veridies 8y ago
        I don't think so; I set up all my sound stuff before AirPlay 2 was out. I have an Airport base station with two different receivers (one Sony, one Denon), an Airport Express, and a Raspberry Pi running Runeaudio, each of which is connected to its own pair of speakers (or, in the case of one of the receivers, a surround setup). When I stream (from either iTunes on my MacBook or my iPhone) to any one of those, the music will have pretty frequent interruptions; it really shouldn't, either, because my MacBook is typically about five meters away from the Airport Express in the same room. The problem is significantly lessened when I play MP3 music instead of ALAC, and significantly worsened when I play 24-bit audio files, which suggests that bandwidth may be the problem.

pishpash 8y ago

The trend is not so much driven by wanting unnecessary complexity (but that is the result), as by the desire to remove physical interfaces to machines. Optimistically this is just some haughty designer's prematurely executed ideal of human-machine symbiosis; pessimistically this is the transfer of means of user control over machines to the corporation, allowing external control over machines and thereby users.

whalesalad 8y ago

You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices. I feel like you’re kinda grumpy here for no reason? You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware? You’d actually want a usb dac/amp in that situation. (Which you claim is a negative) “Sick of being run over by convenience freaks” sorry to say it bud... but you’re the “freak” here (in the sense that you are the extreme of the extreme, don’t mean that in a derogatory way) You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream.

shkkmo 8y ago
> You’re on your high horse about the sennheisers but the commodity hardware we are talking about isn’t capable of properly powering those types of devices. I use sennheiser headphones with my smart phone on a regular basis. > You clearly care about sound and want the best experience so why would you attach a non-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware? Because that's what is there, convenience trumps quality in many situations. > You can’t get grumpy about mainstream devices following the mainstream. You are not mainstream. On what do you base this? The article itself shows that the majority of headphone purchases are not bluetooth. It seems like the 'mainstream' uses headphone jacks.
tomc1985 8y ago
"on-usb amp to a crappy aux port on commodity hardware?" Well, the cool thing about flexibility is that I can do that if I want to, and it will still work if I don't. Yes the amps in phone headphone ports are crap but as long as you're aren't trying to walk around with $500+ cans with crazy high resistance everything still works fine. And as for the mainstream, you really have to step back and think about all the people in this world with audio players... first world and third, high and low tech, city slickers and country folk, blah blah blah. What port do the majority of those devices have?

hannasanarion 8y ago

So you're totally fine with carrying around an external hardware amp, but a dongle for it is intolerably inconvenient?

KingMob 8y ago
What external hardware amp are you referring to? Bluetooth headphones have an amp, not wired headphones. And the phones themselves will continue to have an amp as long as they have speakers.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  I was responding directly to the person above me who objected to the loss of the 2.5mm jack because he can't plug his amp into his phone anymore. This seems silly to me, because if using fancy headphones is important enough to you to carry around an amp, it is negligible additional cost to also carry around a dongle.

agitator 8y ago

I mean if you prefer old technology, that's all good. No one is stopping you from using your old headphones with your old phone. The convenience of not having to untangle headphones, not accidentally yanking them out of a device when walking away, or being able to exercise with a device sitting somewhere else in the room is a welcome innovation IMO. Yes, apple forced people's hand with removing the port (They aren't making these products for fun) to make money, but when has a business made bold moves if it didn't mean making money in the long run? When apple started removing ports, I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones.

blahedo 8y ago
> ...I bought stock, which payed for my new headphones. This reads as: "What's your problem? I have lots of money, so I can afford this." When people talk about classism and privilege in the tech industry, this is the sort of thing they mean. Nobody claimed that bluetooth headsets aren't better in some situations—but their benefits are not necessarily in areas that interest everyone. "Forcing people's hand" to buy the more expensive but unneeded thing is precisely what the OP is complaining about, and your post does not address that argument even a little bit.
- agitator 8y ago
  I agree my comment does sound brash, which wasn't my intention. But what I meant was, apple is selling products, and trying to maximize it's profits. If you don't like the feeling of manipulation, you don't need to buy into it. Marketting, social pressure, device ecosystems, they are all strategies that get you to buy, and keep buying. And I implicitly did address the OP's comment, in that I agree. They are forcing people's hands, it sucks. But if you are going to buy into it, you might also recognize that other's will buy into it and try to make profit for yourself by owning a portion of the company. I was in no way implying that I'm rich. I was implying that you can play the game too if you want. What do you think will happen as AI continues to develop? Either you sit idly complaining about robots taking your jobs, or you start trying to gain part ownership of the companies that will build those robots. You have to be proactive because companies don't give a sh*t about your wellbeing, they have no incentive to do so.

kminehart 8y ago

Another thing that is really obnoxious is how there is now an inconsistency with how it's implemented. Some phones use a pass-through system so USB-C headphones connect directly to the phone's amplifier / DAC (digital-to-analog converter); other cables might contain a DAC / amp themselves, while the last small percentage just transfer a digital signal. Phones with speakers already have a dedicated DAC and amp. The headphone jack was just a way to interface with the amplifier. Manufacturers turned a small size issue into a giant consistency problem that didn't need to exist.

gambiting 8y ago

I work in a games studio, where I have dozens of PCs, consoles and their controllers running all the time around me in close proximity - my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal. If I as much as wave my hand in between the headphones and the phone, the signal is gone, they start stuttering like crazy. Bluetooth is absolute trash for audio transmission, I have no idea who though it would be a good idea to share the same frequency with other 2.4GHz devices for something so sensitive as audio.

vardump 8y ago
> my bluetooth headphones(rather expensive pair of Sony over-ear headphones) constantly loses signal. I had the same exact problem. Turned out to be a crappy bluetooth chip on the PC side, despite being a Bluetooth Class 1 device, rated for 100m range. With a new bluetooth USB dongle, it even sometimes works between floors without drop outs (!). Of course it might also be a manufacturing error in your headphones, extremely radio noisy environment, but never forget to check it's not simply faulty hardware.

Insanity 8y ago

I entirely agree with you. Plus, I don't feel like the cable is all that inconvenient anyway. I got high-end headphones (And low-end earphones for when working out) and the cable has never been an issue to me. Yes, maybe the wires tangle on the earphones, and then you untangle them. Plus, for high-end gear I find that I don't move about with it a lot, so the wires are pretty much always in a similar position on my desk and don't create any problems either.