5 ms·

> Sometimes they will randomly disconnect during use. FYI, that's interference. Wi-fi "randomly" disconnects for a few seconds due to interference just as ofte

by derefr 5y ago

> Sometimes they will randomly disconnect during use. FYI, that's interference. Wi-fi "randomly" disconnects for a few seconds due to interference just as often, but you don't notice, because 1. the OS hides short disconnects, and 2. most protocols you use are TCP-based, and so use retries. (If you were doing something involving UDP streaming, you'd notice.) Bluetooth audio, on the other hand, is a realtime protocol, which just drops stale packets rather than trying to retransmit them. Drop enough packets in a row, and the carrier thinks the device has gone out of range and disconnects it (as the alternative would be boiling your battery by turning the antenna gain up to infinity, as sometimes happens when cellular baseband misbehaves while ranging.) > Gestures and voice are simply not as convenient as buttons on the wire. If I tap the thing in my ear, it tends to get shoved further into my ear and may still not register Have you tried the AirPods Pro where you squeeze the stems? They're essentially buttons. > Crucially, there isn’t a single problem above that occurs when using wires. Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. Or: try to change your shirt while keeping your headphones on + playing. (I know, unusual thing to do, but I've changed my shirt with wireless earbuds in without a thought.) Or: get up and go to the bathroom, while continuing to listen to the livestream you're watching on the desktop PC sitting on your desk, without missing anything. (Provided I'm at home, I can usually get about 40 feet away from the Bluetooth source before my wireless headphones disconnect.)

eertami 5y ago
>Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. This is really easy with a backpack, I assume it's only a problem with a messenger bag (which is probably a bigger problem for one's back, unless the load is kept very light.)
yodsanklai 5y ago
> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. First world problem...
mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. Well what I used to do when I had wired headphones was run the headphone cable under the bag so to speak. As in put on my headphones and then put on my bag. You just need to make sure you have enough slack in the headphones above the bag strap, which... I dunno I never found difficult. I just habitually put on my bag second, or would place my ear buds in my shirt/cups around my neck at least before putting on the bag. Don't get me wrong it's nice for that to not matter with wireless, it's just the way you've phrased this implies to me putting the headphones on first and bag on second so the bag strap sits on top of the headphone cable never occurred to you and honestly that is confusing me
chii 5y ago
i too, used to shun bluetooth headphones. But since i've started using it, i've come around - the interference drops and the battery, both aren't enough to overcome the increase in convenience and portability. It's really, really good to have that portability with headphones.
nayaketo 5y ago
> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. This used to bug me a lot but I've found an easy solution. Just route the wire under your t-shirt or shirt or jacket. When I'm not using my headphones, the headphones hang around my neck. If I feel like taking off my headphones and placing them on the table, it takes 5 extra seconds to pull the wires from under my shirt after disconnecting them from the phone.
- derefr 5y ago
  Do you have a length of slack cable dangling out the bottom of your shirt, like a performer wearing a lavalier mic? If not, then how do retrieve your phone from your pocket in order to change what you're listening to (or just to read something), without the cable yanking your own shirt up?
  - Vrondi 5y ago
    Get some decent headphones with in line controls on the cord or earcups, then you will not need to take the phone out of your pocket as often.
    - derefr 5y ago
      I have those. What I need to do that requires pulling out my phone, is selecting what I'll listen to next. When listening to music, I don't usually bother to "queue up" songs/entire albums in advance, or to make playlists, but rather I just have a library of individual tracks, and then, as I listen to a song, I'll have a whim for what song to listen to next. (I use music to inspire me while writing fiction, so a lot of this is about creating the right mental mood for a scene.) If I'm not listening to music, I'm listening to podcasts, which are also often a "listen to one episode, then pull your phone back out to select the next one" sort of experience, as many of them like to do things like slip in repeats of old episodes, such that a linear listening order gives you things you wouldn't want.
  - devilbunny 5y ago
havkd 5y ago
> Wi-fi "randomly" disconnects for a few seconds due to interference just as often, but you don't notice That’s false. If it happens to you, get better wireless equipment.
- derefr 5y ago
  I say "disconnect" but I don't mean that the 802.11 PHY driver of the computer or the base station notices that there's a disconnection. Just that there's a time-correlated burst of packet loss on some/all channels. This might not ever happen to you if you live in a bunker, or on a farmstead at least 500 feet from any neighbours. (Though I wouldn't completely discount the possibility; there's always solar storms.) But if you live in a city, and like to sit near large picture windows (where the light from the window cuts across the straight-line path between your wireless devices and their base station), then every once in a while you're going to get what's basically a mini-EMP blast blowing through your window glass, on one random unlicensed-spectrum-interfering frequency on another: every time someone in the building across from yours vacuums with a 1950s vacuum cleaner with an ungrounded plug, or uses their shitty $50 freestanding microwave with underspecced side shielding; or operates their unlicensed AliExpress garage-door opener, or... etc. If we could hear 2.4/5GHz, every day in a city would sound like Diwali: sudden short explosions, from every direction, at any odd hour of the day. Remember, "unlicensed" spectrum means the FCC isn't policing those bands like they do with licensed allocations; so all the 2.4/5GHz "polluters" — the device buyers, and the manufacturers — never get told to stop.
  - havkd 5y ago
    A burst of packet loss that doesn’t translate into at least a disconnection of current TCP streams is, by definition, not a disconnection.
    - derefr 5y ago
      There are plenty of connection-oriented protocols other than TCP that do experience a disconnect during these packet-loss bursts. RTP, for example. There's a reason IP softphones are always wired, rather than being wi-fi devices — speaking RTP, they can't tolerate the somewhat-normal condition of RF-interference-induced 802.11-PHY packet-loss bursts nearly as well as devices speaking TCP can. They end up dropping calls in about the same way that Bluetooth Audio drops pairing. (This is also most of why 802.11e QoS Traffic Categories exist — RTP is essentially hard-realtime, so even temporarily queuing RTP packets due to competing high-throughput TCP flows, could be enough to "choke out" the RTP flow.)
nemof 5y ago
i've destroyed so many wired headphones by forgetting i'm wearing them and trying to take off my bag and tearing them out of my ears forcefully. it got to the point where i ended up using wired headphones like a consumable. switching over to wireless has been bliss just for this simple reason. my biggest gripe with wireless so far, and this might be specific to galaxy buds+ is that their batteries suck after a years use. otherwise, all the things you describe are why they're great.
- eertami 5y ago
  Do you exclusively use a messenger bag/shoulder bag? I've never had a problem with a backpack and wired headphones. There's an auxiliary benefit as well in that a backpack seems to be way better for my back than a shoulder bag.
  - aksss 5y ago
    A downside being that backpacks (outside of hiking context) are so visually associated with schoolchildren that wearing them as a professional is kind of impossible, image-wise. For someone fresh out of college maybe; for thirty+ it starts communicating a very juvenile appearance. The key with messenger and shoulder bag ergonomics is all in positioning (vertically and in orientation relative to body).
    - Vrondi 5y ago
      No, silly. You just get a nicer backpack that is made of leather or something instead of nylon.
    - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
      How juvenile do you have to be to give a fuck about what people think of you wearing a backpack
      - Arrath 5y ago
        Or to give more than a second's through to someone wearing a backpack, beyond "oh hey they have a backpack". For one, if you're carrying enough crap isn't a backpack more ergonomic (assuming you wear both straps and aren't one-strapping it like the cool guy you are)
dangerface 5y ago
1. Stopping the music because its disconnected is literally non functional, its cool you can change your shirt without having to take out your head phones for 5 seconds but I just want mine to work while im going for a walk. 2. I have big hands buttons on the ear pod just knock it out of my ear. 3. I can take my bag off my sholder without taking out my wired headphones. When I try to take my shirt off with wireless headphones they just get knocked out of my ear and im on the locker room floor looking for them. Bluetooth doesn't have the range to do this without dropping in and out, at least in my house. The big takeaway is that even the best wireless headphones on the market are less reliable than the cheapest wired.
hasmanean 5y ago
There is a happy medium. Wireless headphones with a short wire hanging down to use as an antenna. Now send audio using 900MHz analog FM radio. The signal quality can be made quite high by using enough power and/or bandwidth spreading. Delay is near zero and it reconnects faster than you can blink at it.
- derefr 5y ago
  Sure, they already make those ("radio" headphones); they sell them in pairs with 900MHz transmitters, for — among other things — people who are hard-of-hearing to better hear their (old, non-Bluetooth-enabled) TVs. But I'm pretty sure what you're really trying to mentally re-engineer here is one of these: https://en-ca.sennheiser.com/stage-monitoring-headphones-headsets https://en-ca.sennheiser.com/stage-monitoring-headphones-hea... Ever wondered what's in the rack on rear center stage of a concert? One of these, so the performers can all hear the mix over their own instrument/the crowd without tripping all over cables. (More recently, they're two-way, meaning that the e.g. electric guitar you hear is passing through a chain of: headphone pre-amp, wireless transmitter, wireless receiver, mixing board, amp. Effects pedals? These days, they're wireless MIDI controllers that signal to a DAW plugged into the mixing board!)

by derefr 5y ago

eertami 5y ago

>Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. This is really easy with a backpack, I assume it's only a problem with a messenger bag (which is probably a bigger problem for one's back, unless the load is kept very light.)

yodsanklai 5y ago

> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. First world problem...

mecha_ghidorah 5y ago

> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. Well what I used to do when I had wired headphones was run the headphone cable under the bag so to speak. As in put on my headphones and then put on my bag. You just need to make sure you have enough slack in the headphones above the bag strap, which... I dunno I never found difficult. I just habitually put on my bag second, or would place my ear buds in my shirt/cups around my neck at least before putting on the bag. Don't get me wrong it's nice for that to not matter with wireless, it's just the way you've phrased this implies to me putting the headphones on first and bag on second so the bag strap sits on top of the headphone cable never occurred to you and honestly that is confusing me

chii 5y ago

i too, used to shun bluetooth headphones. But since i've started using it, i've come around - the interference drops and the battery, both aren't enough to overcome the increase in convenience and portability. It's really, really good to have that portability with headphones.

nayaketo 5y ago

> Put on your wired headphones. Sit down (e.g. on the bus.) Now try taking off your shoulder-strapped bag to hold it in your lap, without first taking out your headphones. This used to bug me a lot but I've found an easy solution. Just route the wire under your t-shirt or shirt or jacket. When I'm not using my headphones, the headphones hang around my neck. If I feel like taking off my headphones and placing them on the table, it takes 5 extra seconds to pull the wires from under my shirt after disconnecting them from the phone.

derefr 5y ago
Do you have a length of slack cable dangling out the bottom of your shirt, like a performer wearing a lavalier mic? If not, then how do retrieve your phone from your pocket in order to change what you're listening to (or just to read something), without the cable yanking your own shirt up?
- Vrondi 5y ago
  Get some decent headphones with in line controls on the cord or earcups, then you will not need to take the phone out of your pocket as often.
  - derefr 5y ago
    I have those. What I need to do that requires pulling out my phone, is selecting what I'll listen to next. When listening to music, I don't usually bother to "queue up" songs/entire albums in advance, or to make playlists, but rather I just have a library of individual tracks, and then, as I listen to a song, I'll have a whim for what song to listen to next. (I use music to inspire me while writing fiction, so a lot of this is about creating the right mental mood for a scene.) If I'm not listening to music, I'm listening to podcasts, which are also often a "listen to one episode, then pull your phone back out to select the next one" sort of experience, as many of them like to do things like slip in repeats of old episodes, such that a linear listening order gives you things you wouldn't want.
- devilbunny 5y ago

havkd 5y ago

> Wi-fi "randomly" disconnects for a few seconds due to interference just as often, but you don't notice That’s false. If it happens to you, get better wireless equipment.

derefr 5y ago
I say "disconnect" but I don't mean that the 802.11 PHY driver of the computer or the base station notices that there's a disconnection. Just that there's a time-correlated burst of packet loss on some/all channels. This might not ever happen to you if you live in a bunker, or on a farmstead at least 500 feet from any neighbours. (Though I wouldn't completely discount the possibility; there's always solar storms.) But if you live in a city, and like to sit near large picture windows (where the light from the window cuts across the straight-line path between your wireless devices and their base station), then every once in a while you're going to get what's basically a mini-EMP blast blowing through your window glass, on one random unlicensed-spectrum-interfering frequency on another: every time someone in the building across from yours vacuums with a 1950s vacuum cleaner with an ungrounded plug, or uses their shitty $50 freestanding microwave with underspecced side shielding; or operates their unlicensed AliExpress garage-door opener, or... etc. If we could hear 2.4/5GHz, every day in a city would sound like Diwali: sudden short explosions, from every direction, at any odd hour of the day. Remember, "unlicensed" spectrum means the FCC isn't policing those bands like they do with licensed allocations; so all the 2.4/5GHz "polluters" — the device buyers, and the manufacturers — never get told to stop.
- havkd 5y ago
  A burst of packet loss that doesn’t translate into at least a disconnection of current TCP streams is, by definition, not a disconnection.
  - derefr 5y ago
    There are plenty of connection-oriented protocols other than TCP that do experience a disconnect during these packet-loss bursts. RTP, for example. There's a reason IP softphones are always wired, rather than being wi-fi devices — speaking RTP, they can't tolerate the somewhat-normal condition of RF-interference-induced 802.11-PHY packet-loss bursts nearly as well as devices speaking TCP can. They end up dropping calls in about the same way that Bluetooth Audio drops pairing. (This is also most of why 802.11e QoS Traffic Categories exist — RTP is essentially hard-realtime, so even temporarily queuing RTP packets due to competing high-throughput TCP flows, could be enough to "choke out" the RTP flow.)

nemof 5y ago

i've destroyed so many wired headphones by forgetting i'm wearing them and trying to take off my bag and tearing them out of my ears forcefully. it got to the point where i ended up using wired headphones like a consumable. switching over to wireless has been bliss just for this simple reason. my biggest gripe with wireless so far, and this might be specific to galaxy buds+ is that their batteries suck after a years use. otherwise, all the things you describe are why they're great.

eertami 5y ago
Do you exclusively use a messenger bag/shoulder bag? I've never had a problem with a backpack and wired headphones. There's an auxiliary benefit as well in that a backpack seems to be way better for my back than a shoulder bag.
- aksss 5y ago
  A downside being that backpacks (outside of hiking context) are so visually associated with schoolchildren that wearing them as a professional is kind of impossible, image-wise. For someone fresh out of college maybe; for thirty+ it starts communicating a very juvenile appearance. The key with messenger and shoulder bag ergonomics is all in positioning (vertically and in orientation relative to body).
  - Vrondi 5y ago
    No, silly. You just get a nicer backpack that is made of leather or something instead of nylon.
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    How juvenile do you have to be to give a fuck about what people think of you wearing a backpack
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Or to give more than a second's through to someone wearing a backpack, beyond "oh hey they have a backpack". For one, if you're carrying enough crap isn't a backpack more ergonomic (assuming you wear both straps and aren't one-strapping it like the cool guy you are)

dangerface 5y ago

1. Stopping the music because its disconnected is literally non functional, its cool you can change your shirt without having to take out your head phones for 5 seconds but I just want mine to work while im going for a walk. 2. I have big hands buttons on the ear pod just knock it out of my ear. 3. I can take my bag off my sholder without taking out my wired headphones. When I try to take my shirt off with wireless headphones they just get knocked out of my ear and im on the locker room floor looking for them. Bluetooth doesn't have the range to do this without dropping in and out, at least in my house. The big takeaway is that even the best wireless headphones on the market are less reliable than the cheapest wired.

hasmanean 5y ago

There is a happy medium. Wireless headphones with a short wire hanging down to use as an antenna. Now send audio using 900MHz analog FM radio. The signal quality can be made quite high by using enough power and/or bandwidth spreading. Delay is near zero and it reconnects faster than you can blink at it.

derefr 5y ago
Sure, they already make those ("radio" headphones); they sell them in pairs with 900MHz transmitters, for — among other things — people who are hard-of-hearing to better hear their (old, non-Bluetooth-enabled) TVs. But I'm pretty sure what you're really trying to mentally re-engineer here is one of these: https://en-ca.sennheiser.com/stage-monitoring-headphones-headsets https://en-ca.sennheiser.com/stage-monitoring-headphones-hea... Ever wondered what's in the rack on rear center stage of a concert? One of these, so the performers can all hear the mix over their own instrument/the crowd without tripping all over cables. (More recently, they're two-way, meaning that the e.g. electric guitar you hear is passing through a chain of: headphone pre-amp, wireless transmitter, wireless receiver, mixing board, amp. Effects pedals? These days, they're wireless MIDI controllers that signal to a DAW plugged into the mixing board!)