I have spent thousands on the cool noise cancelling bluetooth headsets. Each of them is garbage. (I just kept buying them, hoping that at least one of them is not only hyped, but have some substance also)
Also, just broke a cheap Hama mouse into pieces, literally today. It was only like ~$5, but the worst piece of trash I have had: it turns off after 2 minutes of inactivity, and on top of that it can't wake up always... (well, couldn't wake up. It's in the mouse-heaven now)
My Bose QC15 headphones (bought around 2009) are probably my best tech purchase ever. I've had to replace the foam ear pad pieces twice, but otherwise they're fantastic. These are wired (no bluetooth).
Out of curiosity, what issues have you had with them? (I'm not at all involved with their development, just a fellow user of them).
I had the Bose and Sony ones. They were OK, just uncomfortable. Been using the in-ear Airpods Pro for a few years now, for everything from work to flights to trains to exercising, and I love them soooo much... they're probably my favorite tech purchase ever (and I don't even have an iPhone). Pairing is always a pain in the ass (I just manually pair again with every device I want to switch to) but other than that, they've been so nice.
Personally, I'm not an audiophile, but I find the audio quality incredible (vs my Sonos speakers, wired Koss PortaPros, generic soundbars, Sony XM3 and Bose QC35s, etc.) and the comfort unbeatable. But some people hate the in-ear kind.
Anyway, not trying to convince you of anything, just wondering what made your experiences so different and bad?
My problems were very varied, depending on the specific model. Trying not to make it a full rant. While I have many types of music on my player, primarily I listen to rock/metal.
Common problem: ANC changes the music too. It messes with the mids and highs, regardless of the model. Some are better than the others... but of course ANC can be turned off, which I did frequently in the past years. Oh, and the low battery warning: "ATTENTION - battery will be empty in 4 hours, let me disrupt your music every 60-120 seconds till the end of time!".
Bose QC35, QC45: They are pretty much the same, both inside and outside. Very comfortable, can't argue with that. They randomly they cut off the first/last 2 seconds of the tracks (how did they even release them like that is a mystery for me). Also, no bass, no highs, just a pile of mids. Almost 0 dynamics - you will never hear any other instruments else during a bass-guitar heavy track...
Sennheiser PCX-550 ii: It sometimes sounded fairly decent, even with ANC, however rather uncomfortable. The touch interface is catastrophic (in humid weather all the controls activate at the same time. Literally: volume up-down, play-forward-pause-call, all at the once). It had the worst bug I saw so far: about once every 2 weeks it made some extra loud shrilling noise that made me shit my pants (I'd guess the ANC got into some self-amplifying feedback loop). After it came back from "warranty-repair", it did it again within 3 days.
Marshall Monitor II ANC: mushy pile of mids, sounds actually bad, especially for its price. I really thought that it was made for rock music, but no. It is mostly made for audible books. Controls look cool (5-way joystick), but hard to use in practice: if the button press is even half a degree off, it doesn't register. Especially unusable while walking. Used two different sets of this model (after a warranty exchange). Earpads break after 6 months (for both sets). The second set it literally a pain to wear: it makes the top of my head hurt after 20 minutes.
Sony 1000XM2: Very bad touch interface, it feels like the gestures are randomly changing function. Keep disconnecting and stuttering. Sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes after 2 hours. The only guaranteed thing is that one of them happens sooner or later. If I apply a ton of EQ on each track one by one as they are played, it is possible to get decent sound of it. But usually I just want to listen to music, without messing with EQ every few minutes.
Airpods pro: Keeps disconnecting. ANC keeps turning on and off, living its own life. Sometimes only one side has sound. But it doesn't sound bad, when it works. It doesn't happen very often though. Too bad Apple ran out of SW developers.
I have only one BT headset that I keep using still, though exclusively for workouts: Sony MDR-ZX770: I got it like 8 years ago. It sounds crap, but very robust and reliable at what it does. If you want a bad sounding cheap headset, I recommend this one lol.
I had some random headsets from Amazon also, Chinese garden variety, but I won't even say anything about them.
But in a nutshell, that's why I have had enough. Now I'm just back to oldschool headsets, and hear every instrument without bugs.
> Airpods pro: Keeps disconnecting. ANC keeps turning on and off, living its own life. Sometimes only one side has sound. But it doesn't sound bad, when it works. It doesn't happen very often though. Too bad Apple ran out of SW developers.
Given the popularity of the product you’re presumably aware this isn’t a typical experience. I certainly haven’t encountered disconnects or ANC switching off uncommanded, and the only time I get one-sided sound is if one side runs out of battery. You might consider asking Apple to replace them.
And it's not only the Airpods that are very popular. All of them are popular and most of the people don't face this issues. I have some Sony XM3 and although the touch interface is weird you get used to it and I never face issues with connection as stated.
This is hilarious. The Devil's been urging me to buy one of high-end ones for the past year -- I specifically clicked on this post hoping to see someone regretting buying one of these things so I could use it as fuel against my utopian fantasies.
Have had great luck with my Soundcore by Anker Space Q45 Adaptive Active Noise Cancelling Headphones. They are cost competitive, but not perfect. Recommend.
Thanks, but the truth is, a few months ago I "accidentally" tried a good old cabled Audio Technica, and suddenly I realized that I haven't really enjoyed music for a good part of the past decade. I'm back in the middle-ages, when it comes to music listening, and there is no way I'm switching.
There's no better noise cancelling than as much bulk around your ears and as thick a wall around your room as possible! I too have a wired Audio-Technica (ATH-M40x) and can highly recommend it. I got immeasurable pleasure out of discovering that many of my favourite pieces of music had entire lines that I never knew existed when still using lesser audio equipment!
Another suggestion of mine is to listen to CDs from the late 80s, when record labels considered 'digital' a mark of quality and actually followed through with the marketing. They tend to be the best, in my opinion - they have good dynamic range which nowadays is usually compressed out of the recordings to maximise loudness, and they had just started using 192kbs bitrates, which I consider to be at the upper level of my hearing ability. No help for new albums, of course, but hopefully those will have FLAC downloads available as some consolation!
I don't understand your "192kbps" remark. It seems to be a reference to some sort of lossy compression, but the context was audio CDs (from the 80s, even!). Audio CDs are all uncompressed PCM at 1411kbps, nothing else is possible - especially in the 80s! Lossy audio compression was in its infancy, and mp3 was not defined until 1991.
Yes, that was an error; sorry for any confusion. What I was trying to express is that the bitrates of digital recording equipment in the early 80s had become so high that the digital recording would be effectively indistinguishable from its analogue source. Yet, not long beforehand, the capacity and speed of digital memory was insufficient to keep up with the required ~44khz sampling rate required.
It seems that my confabulation of 192kbps was also a gross underestimation - apparently, the Sony PCM-1, which was released in 1977, already had a bitrate of 573kbps.
Have you ever tried the Tidal streams (https://tidal.com/sound-quality) in FLAC? Are those at all comparable to these high-quality recordings you mentioned?
As someone who grew up later in the MP3 era (90s), I guess I never knew what "good" audio ever sounded like. I'd love to do a back-to-back comparison of the same song, one in "modern" shitty no-dynamic-range and the other in a higher-fidelity version to see if I can notice any difference at all. Between my consumer equipment and my aging ears, I dunno if I'll be able to at all...?
I have these headphones, they are great. Amazing price.
I recently bought a pair of Bose QuietComfort Ultra and sent them back because I had nothing but issues with them and they were barely any better than the Anker's when working. Certainly not worth the price difference.