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Personally, I treat wireless earbuds as essentially disposable items. Even if they're mechanically reliable, they fall out on a ride/run, they fill up with earw

by rgmerk 3y ago

Personally, I treat wireless earbuds as essentially disposable items. Even if they're mechanically reliable, they fall out on a ride/run, they fill up with earwax, and are otherwise way too vulnerable to invest hundreds of dollars on. The sound quality of $30 Bluetooth earbuds from no-name vendors is plenty good enough in the terrible acoustic environments I use them. If you want good sound quality, no earbud is ever going to come close to a good set of full-size headphones, so I'd prefer to invest money in those instead. Yeah, active noise cancellation would be nice but I imagine that the next generation of cheapie earbuds will have that too. While I get the desire for reducing environmental impact, the total mass of these earbuds is so small that it hardly seems worrying about in terms of the millions of tons of crap that goes into landfill every year.

aloisklink 3y ago
You should try the Moondrop Space Travel, you can buy them for USD 24.99 on Amazon. - Moondrop is a pretty well known brand in the ChiFi (Chinese Hi-Fi) space. - They support AAC so they even have good audio quality on Apple/iPhone devices (most cheap earbuds only use cheap Android codecs). - Normally, their latency is pretty high, but they do have a low-latency mode in case you ever want to play games + take a call. - It's Bluetooth 5.3 and communicates directly to each earbud (e.g. if you want, you can only use one at a time). - And, they have active noise cancellation that's surprisingly good (in fact, it's amazing for $25!). IMO, the main downsides are: - Their app is meant to be horrible (I didn't even bother to install it). Not a big deal, unless you want to play around with EQ, customizing what the touch controls do, or upgrade the firmware. - There's no way to control the volume via touch controls (although maybe the app allows you to change this) - Even though it supports Bluetooth 5.3, I don't think it supports Bluetooth LE Audio and the LC3 codec. These earbuds are probably completely uneconomical to recycle, but at least at $25, they probably didn't have too much of an environmental impact when they were created (assuming that the cost of the item is roughly correlated with the environmental impact of the item).

by rgmerk 3y ago

aloisklink 3y ago

You should try the Moondrop Space Travel, you can buy them for USD 24.99 on Amazon. - Moondrop is a pretty well known brand in the ChiFi (Chinese Hi-Fi) space. - They support AAC so they even have good audio quality on Apple/iPhone devices (most cheap earbuds only use cheap Android codecs). - Normally, their latency is pretty high, but they do have a low-latency mode in case you ever want to play games + take a call. - It's Bluetooth 5.3 and communicates directly to each earbud (e.g. if you want, you can only use one at a time). - And, they have active noise cancellation that's surprisingly good (in fact, it's amazing for $25!). IMO, the main downsides are: - Their app is meant to be horrible (I didn't even bother to install it). Not a big deal, unless you want to play around with EQ, customizing what the touch controls do, or upgrade the firmware. - There's no way to control the volume via touch controls (although maybe the app allows you to change this) - Even though it supports Bluetooth 5.3, I don't think it supports Bluetooth LE Audio and the LC3 codec. These earbuds are probably completely uneconomical to recycle, but at least at $25, they probably didn't have too much of an environmental impact when they were created (assuming that the cost of the item is roughly correlated with the environmental impact of the item).