The audio quality on these battery powered blue tooth headphones is fucking awful. IM not a purist by any stretch, but a decent pair of head phones is a whole other world of music vs anything AirPods like.
So, the 3.5mm jack can die. I'm now on team "dual USB ports" to solve the charging-while-listening issue. Let's go team!
I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but my hearing is pretty good and I'm sensitive to quality loss
As it turns out, the unexpected benefit of not having wires is that the cord doesn't get caught on everything all the time, and that's good enough to overcome the poor battery life for me.
The first two generations were notorious for connectivity glitches, but the TW3s appear to have fixed everything by. Great ANC, battery life, ear fit.
They even added multipoint through a free software update that came out about a year after launch.
I have heard a lot in the past few years of people praising cheap IEM's (I still don't get the difference between IEM's and a pair of wired headphones) and am curious to refresh my iPod Classic to use with some but I wouldn't know where to begin.
If you still like you want to use your wired headphones, something like the Fiio BTR5 is pretty excellent - you can use it either wired via USB-C for highest quality, or via bluetooth for convenience.
For example, Sony's headphones have lossless Bluetooth, and so do Samsung's, and the quality of the headphones themselves is quite good, even by audiophile standards, for in-ears.
You can also get bluetooth adapters for traditional IEMs, Fiio and KZ sell good ones.
At the end of the day, there really is no technical reason why bluetooth headphones have to sound any worse than wired headphones.
It sounds so much better than using the 3.5mm jack given the use of the onboard DAC.
I'm not convinced the new separate ones are better. Behind the head may still be the better option, and sliding them down around your neck when you need to be social ticks a lot of checkboxes for me as well.
Personally, I could never stand using wired headphones with my phone, so I wouldn't want to do it. But the option's there.
(Used wired on-ears and IEMs for a while, tried using an adapter for a bit, switched to Bluetooth over-ears recently. Appreciate the convenience, don’t appreciate One More Thing I Must Charge.)
I love my AirPod Pros.
They may not have the best sound but having noise cancelling headphones I can keep my pocket is transformative.
I love that there’s no cable to pick up mechanical noise as it catches on things.
What I don’t love is buying more Apple stuff or knowing their batteries can’t be replaced.
When my AirPods break I’ll be in the market for these.
I'll likely upgrade once the EU finally forces all phone companies to release phones with user replaceable batteries, and someone produces a phone that isn't gigantic. There aren't any medium sized phones any more. Everything's half a foot long.
That said, they certainly make much more sense Financially. I’ve spent far more money on headphones since going wireless.
(I have a Fairphone 4)
Headphone jacks were a major wear item on older smartphones, and waterproofing them is very annoying as well, requiring a ton of adhesives. I had to take the back glass off my old Xperia Z2C three times over its life to replace the headphone jack, and the waterproofing was totally shot after doing so. At the end of the day, I honestly don’t mind the trade off, although I can see how it can be annoying for others.
I ended up buying a small battery-powered Bluetooth-to-3.5mm receiver that I keep in my left pocket, and then send Bluetooth audio to it from my phone in my right pocket. It's a pretty ridiculous setup.
As an electronics guy the jack is rarely the issue, a TRS jack has spring contacts inside, so wear should not be an issue unless they use the shittiest of connectors or you actually damage the bonding between connector and PCB. It is 100 times more likely for the plug to fail and a 1000 times more likely for the cable to fail.
I've had the area around jacks get scratched over the years, but I've never had them fail due to mechanical wear. Is this common for others?
I've certainly had the micro and mini USB ports fail on me over the years though.
The material and monetary cost of the number of wired headphones I've destroyed in the 6 years before I got wireless head phones (because there was no realistic way to stow the cabling for the activity I was involved in) probably approaches the cost of the 2 pairs of wireless headphones I've owned in the last 6 years.
I don't think they cut the headphone jack just to sell these headphones. While it is true that you can make a headphone jack as water-resistant as the rest of the phone, every hole you put in the phone adds to the design and assembly cost to maintain the same IP rating. And each hole significantly adds to the complexity of repairing that phone in such a way that it maintains that IP rating after the repair.
I've lost either the earbuds or case of so many wireless earbuds during the past 4 years that I could have afforded 2-3 much higher quality wired earbuds.
A set of small wireless headphones uses far less material than a large pair of wired headphones. Not saying it is a direct replacement, just that everything has some environmental impact, and fretting over one tiny device misses the forest for the trees.
Don't get me wrong the replacement cables can often run like $50 but still, it's not exactly breaking the headphone
I love my wxm4s but I'm on my third pair due to battery life. Wish they had user replaceable batteries... Heck at least for the case
Sounds like you want usb type c! In addition to Audio Adapter Accessory Mode which allows it to drive a couple pins with analog audio exactly like the 3.5mm jacks (and therefore enabling completely passive adapters to support devices with 3.5mm jacks), usb type c also supports charging, high speed data, and video. That's a lot more universal than some silly jack that can only support audio.
Unfortunately it looks like at least the fairphone 4 didn't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode and I haven't found information on whether the fairphone 5 supports it. Definitely a mark against the company if they don't support Audio Adapter Accessory Mode.
And most people who say "just use the dongle" are not using the dongle.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/AGPtek-Streambot-Mini-Bluetooth-W...
Wireless earbuds being repairable is great, but you don't need to remove the jack for that.
I'm also curious if the noise cancelling is any good... I'm tired of being locked into overpriced low quality Bose products, but historically they have been the only ones with truly good noise cancelling. As I have ADHD I need really good noise cancelling to do my job in an open work environment.
Lastly, I'm wondering what the deal is with the earbud tips, as I've found I often need a custom or weird sized one to get things to stay in my ear. The Bose ones generally work for me, as they come with a large array of sizes, but the photos make this look like just a single size.
I'll keep an eye on these- if I can answer these 3 questions/issues I'll buy a set.
https://www.heise.de/news/Fairphone-Fairbuds-In-Ears-mit-Wec...
It's 2024; how come companies like Sony, Panasonic, Energizer and Duracell haven't jumped on offering one or two standard replaceable lithium-ion cells, with integrated circuit protection and slim enough for modern consumer electronics, that people can buy off-the-shelf in drug stores? Many devices are still running on alkaline batteries these days, like smoke detectors and kitchen scales.
It didn't take that long in the old days for standards like AA and AAA batteries to hit the market, and they didn't worry too much about applying them to new chemistries with differing voltages. And with efficient DC-DC converters that are cheap enough to introduce into consumer electronics, battery voltage hardly even matters that much nowadays.
However a major issue is that the charging circuitry/method/design is not standard for rechargeable versions of non-rechargeable standard batteries. So you often need to remove it and charge it with a charging system from the battery manufacturer instead of charging in place.
[1] Many manufacturers, possibly a single factory somewhere in China.
Sadly, they were crap and stopped working after one charge. More e-waste.
For earbud tips - you can get aftermarket replacements of many sizes and shapes for cheap. Look on Amazon or Alibaba, but some brands are more well known like Spinfit.
As for active noise cancellation - my experience has been that anything outside of Bose or Sony is only OK at best. I doubt these are any better than the average set out there. But with the right aftermarket tips you can improve the quality of isolation on cheaper earbuds significantly.
EDIT: others have pointed out that the batteries are indeed standardized.
On-ear headphones hurt my earlobes and over-ear headphones make my head get hot so I can't seem to find happiness anywhere. The custom eartips I think have gotten me the closest though!
I got attached to my AirPods Max. They allow me to have meetings next to people who are also in meetings. Even if they are in the same meeting.
I know what you mean, but still had to laugh :)
All they need are existing customers buy in these new product lines
What's worse is that if/when the market demands replaceable batteries, it's an easy feature for everyone else to clone.
Also the batteries would have to be ordered as a spare part years after the product launched, and most cheap manufacturers are horrible with sustained support.
(Well, their investors might see it a little differently, but Fairphone is never going to be a unicorn company no matter what.)
You seem to belong to group of consumers that wants to compromise lifespan and sustainability in favor of features and price. That's fine, but it simply means you are not their target audience for this product.
It just seems like a lot of overhead for something nobody is going to use in practice.
One of the first steps to recycle an earbud would be to remove the battery and handle that separately from the plastic and metal.
They also sell refurbished AirPods. With the right tools and process, it's just a bit of time, solder, and fresh adhesive. Impractical to do at home, but at scale, it can be done.
I have since bought a phone with a headphone jack and stopped buying wireless headphones.
Old generation, wired Bose in-ear go for under $50 on eBay. Sound quality is better too.
The wire interfering with my jacket took some getting used to again.
EDIT: oh yeah, the batteries don’t die while you’re using wired headphones, either. No more 1-ear’ing so there’s always a bud with battery.
- pro: 10 EUR for a pair of replacement batteries for the earbuds vs ~20 EUR for a pair of VARTA batteries with shipping from Germany
- pro: 13 EUR for a new battery for the case. I need to go to aliexpress to find a replacement battery for the galaxy buds plus case
- pro: replacement process seems to be way easier because it was designed to be replaceable unlike galaxy buds plus
- pro: lighter than the buds: ~5g vs 6.3g
- pro: ANC
- con: more expensive. I paid half the price for the buds. But that was in 2020 money.
- con: they are bigger: 28.7 x 24.6 x 21mm vs 17.5 x 22.5 x 19.2mm
[1] https://www.rtings.com/headphones/graph/23318/frequency-resp...
Personally, I was completely happy with the sound quality of my first TWS (FreeBuds 3). The only reason I felt I needed new ones was a failing battery in one of the buds.
I'm looking to "upgrade" but only because the batteries in my current pair are shot. It feels so bad to have things like this just go into a landfill when they're perfectly fine other than the battery.
edit: oh, these are also 5x as expensive as the $30 earbuds I bought 2 years ago that have a really decent sound profile. Oooof. Sustainable, at a 5x premium? :/
Like your cheap ones certainly don't have ANC which can be a dealbreaker. Other important things are responsive touch control, good set of microphones, app with equalizer, ear detection, wearing comfort...
For my main use case (podcasts), the sound quality is actually the least important aspect of headphones.
The only criticism that holds is that these have touchy touch controls, but for a cost savings of $120, and that being the only compromise for me, it's a no-brainer.
This blog is invaluable. I bought a number of the sub-$50 pairs a couple years back, and compared them against my favorite wired IEMs. They're not the same of course, but damn good for the money. https://www.scarbir.com/guide/best-sounding-wireless-earphon... I wear them 6+ hours a day, or did when the battery was in better health.
If you skim the reviews, you'll see that there are a number of them that have good frequency response, comfort, multi-point. ANC is more or less table stakes, from what I can tell. Etc. Things change fast, you really don't have to spend $100 to get decent earbuds. Hell, even the Galaxy Buds FE, which are very well reviewed can be had for $70USD.
EDIT: Actually, the very latest blog post is pretty descriptive of this: https://www.scarbir.com/tws/cheapest-airpods-like-earbuds-al... (One of the top on the list the successor to the pair I've been rocking since 2022.)
I’m not really looking to spend, overtime, 250 bucks every 3 years on AirPods and seeing Anker space a40s are $40 with this multipoint feature and 10ths of battery life I am tempted to run away from apple or any ear phones above $100 but when Bluetooth is bad, it can be really bad.
It's not a carbon-copy of Apple's approach, but I've had issues with iCloud switching too so I'm rather glad it's not. Plus, the Multipoint approach works with all my weird stuff like my Switch and smart TV.
I hate multipoint bluetooth. It only seems to work in the most basic of scenarios and nobody appears to have been testing the damn thing out of that in real life. Yes Bose I'm looking at you.
Good <deity> that is stupid hellhole of having audio stolen from you because some audio happened to play on the second device because you (or an unattended browser autoupdate) (re)opened some youtube tab, or constant nags about "foo disconnected / foo connected" when at range limit, or you took a call on your computer and moved and got out of range and sure enough it swaps to your phone which decides "oh sure you probably want to enjoy some loud music" and helpfully proceeds to blow your eardrums.
<Deity> forbids you have more than two regularly used devices in which case it's completely useless anyway.
Meanwhile my Beyerdynamic is not multipoint, it merely remembers what it has been paired to (I'm up to six devices now) and just connects to the last one on power up. If I want to use them from another previous one I just pop in bluetooth quick settings and choose "connect to FreeBYRD" which disconnects them from the other one, y'know, like we used to do when there were actual wires plugged into actual physical plugs, which BT is a glorified copperless version of anyway.
* Fair supply chains. This was their original selling point and is still an incredible unique feature. They changed cobalt and copper supply chains and established tracing mechanisms that now other manufacturers can also use.
* Self-repairable. I switched two screens so far, probably not a huge cost difference to the neighbourhood dirty phone repair shop, but I feel better about it.
* Social enterprise, giving back to the community
* Nice to know my funds go mostly to a good cause and everyone in the supply and production chain is treated well (they even pay a premium to manufacturers so workers at the assembly line get paid a fair wage).
I am well aware it's not the best phone. It's rather clunky, camera used to be weak (got much better with the latest update), and I had some small issues. But overall a solid phone, I support a de kind of ecosystem that really improves things down the line and I don't need to feed Sony or Apple execs money.
* Fair supply chains:
After many years of working in Quality Control and Quality Assurance, Supplier Quality Management (I've been on both ends with this one) and related fields (lead auditor, product safety, material safety) for companies large and small, I can safely say that "fair supply chains" is just a marketing fairy tale. Without going too deep into this rabbit hole:
A) You only have so many suppliers. If they don't comply, and unless their performance and/or behavior significantly affects your reputation, contrary to the common belief, you don't just go to somebody else. You give them another opportunity. If they keep failing, you change your evaluation specs, wait a year, and repeat. This becomes a thousand times more of an issue once you include China and generally other countries outside the US and Europe (there are exceptions) into the equation. B) Good luck auditing suppliers in China. C) Good luck finding experienced auditors. They are incredibly rare and expensive. You cannot outsource it either. D) The auditing process is expensive. That's why even the largest companies in toy manufacturing do not audit their supply chains end-to-end. Instead, you have your direct suppliers sign documents binding them to cascade your rules downstream. What happens when you find out they don't? See A.
Should I go on?
(I also quite like that they only have one model so it's easy to decide which one to get)
Either way I have to remember to turn off Bluetooth on the phone, because who's going to manually unpair and repair.
And the earbuds have no light on them in one case (Ankers) and no obvious way to turn them off without listening to a chime (Shures).
I'd like to just blame Bluetooth out of spite, but it seems perhaps a limitation of the drivers of those devices.
I am still using the XM3 - both the earbud and case batteries are repleacable.
The noise cancelling gets slightly better each iteration. There's another thing the 3 and 4 are better at than the 5: easier to get out of the charging case.
Also, while you could replace the batteries in each of these versions, the IP rating would be in practice regressed.
This is awesome. At first I thought they cheated and only made the case battery replaceable.
Anyone know?
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.
- 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).
Something built to last for ten years would be intriguing. I'm still using my Samsung Galaxy Buds+ from 2020 as my daily driver. I prefer the capsule case to the box design of later models, and all of the internals are still "good enough" that I haven't really felt the need to upgrade. Even the lack of ANC hasn't been a dealbreaker--the passive noise cancellation just from having a solid seal around the ear has been enough to happily use on a plane.
Should have fairphone branded on the the case insetad of fairbud.
Ill have long replaced them before i need a new battery due to degredation. Wireless earbuds are a massivly oveesaturated market and you can get comparable earbuds for <$20.
I suspect this is fair co losing its way and engaging in blatent greenwashing.
for context: you can get better sounding non-anc tws for a third of the price, or good budget anc options under 100 usd. i have been personally using a pair of jabra (non-anc) for more than past couple years that i bought for under 40 usd on discount.
if they sell individual headphone for those who lost an individual piece for a fair price, perhaps there is a niche for them in terms of value. otherwise the one-off just buy a new pair for competing offerings are very close alternatives.
“Meet the world's most repairable premium earbuds.”
Okay, if you’re going to lead with This as your flagship feature… well, that says to me they must be complete garbage. Is this a joke?
Why did they not use a standard battery like a 18350 or 16340 for the case? Other advantages too (easy to find alternative chargers and can keep a charged spare).
I presume size constraints would make it difficult to find a commodity battery size for the earbuds?
