alt Hacker NewsI say this as someone with tens of thousands in audio equipment, as someone who can hear the compression warble in the hihats and the cymbals - audio quality with earbuds doesn't actually matter. It's like the argument for audio quality in cars - you're listening in a hostile environment, and convenience wins over fidelity. I remember walking to work one time with over-the-ear Sennheisers attached to my iPod and it felt ridiculous, and unsafe.
I finally capitulated to earbuds when they started giving them away with the Pixel phones. The "find my" feature basically justifies the pro-prices, to me, because my biggest complaint about bluetooth earbuds in my own use case was how easily they're lost. I've lost and recovered my Pixel Buds Pro 2 a couple of times now. When traveling a lot by train and plane, the convenience of pocket-sized noise-cancelling earbuds has become worth it for me.
But when I'm on meetings, I'm wired in. During the pandemic, I lost track of how many times my colleagues' Airpods would sputter out and die in the middle of a client meeting. Then they'd switch to wired headphones and their Macbook microphone. They sounded better, they could hear better, and there was no battery power sword of Damocles anymore.
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> I finally capitulated to earbuds
I'm not audiophile, but I was prepared to do the same, despite the discomfort and obviously-lower sound quality... but the mic isn't even sufficient for meetings in a public place (e.g. a diner at lunch time), whereas my laptop's builtin mic is. How can they expect us to use these things??
I agree. Hell, when I'm listening to music with my full-fat expensive setup, even the noise of the fans in my desktop computer is distracting and adversarial to the listening environment. Bringing those cans outside would be insane.
Convenience is close. IMO it’s all about accessibility, or more generally Good UX. Your coworkers AirPods died because they used it consistently and could just get up and walk around without having to take them out. They were always on because they were in ear and had no reason to be disconnected. They’ll turn off the moment you take them out on iPhones atleast. This is a small example of how the user experience in the Apple Ecosystem for AirPods has been kind of nuts. So if you’re on these devices, there is a palpable difference in ‘convenience’ that goes beyond what is carry-able or safe or consistent.
To further this concept, the reason why you tolerate variable quality isn’t just convenience or accessibility. It’s because you can’t carry your setup around, yes, but furthermore you don’t habitually listen to music because you have the best setup. You do it because you love music. In that regard, the user experiences do become interchangeable. Quality music is accessible on every device and you will listen to it with anything if you love music. The user experience enjoyment levels are ultimately similar with most devices for you, purely when it comes to music listening, just because you love music. It’s a consistently good UX for you.
I say all of this as someone who has also wasted money on expensive listening devices (and loves music) and also someone who isn’t like, crazy about the modern Apple UX. They just got earbuds right when it comes to the experience of an Apple ecosystem user.
Sound quality is worse when transmitting and receiving over Bluetooth, when I use the AirPods for calls on the MacBook I switch to the microphone on the MacBook, they will hear me better and I will hear them better since the AirPods will use all the bandwidth for outputting audio only.
I use my Shokz headset for calls. The boom directional mic is excellent at suppressing background noise on its own and the connection is super reliable with the USB-C dongle (that works on phones as well as laptops)
Disagree slightly with audio quality for cars. I recently got a car with "good" speakers and the difference from regular car speakers is striking. Although I'm sure that the curve quickly flattens on spending more to get more quality, going above the base car speaker level has been awesome for me.