Yeah, let's introduce a major structural flaw and a point of failure to a perfectly sound design :agony-shrooms:
And for what?
"Foldable headphones are so convenient and portable when you're not using them!!"
YOU WEAR THEM AROUND YOUR NECK WHEN NOT USING THEM, DIPSHIT
These stupid hinges turn cheap headphones from durable and reliable backups to instant e-waste
Source: just had a pair of cheap bluetooth headphones crack at the hinges because it was slightly below freezing
Wait, I see people hating on Bluetooth headphones... I like mine (Logitech G435). They're great. Why the hate for Bluetooth?
You used to be able to replace the batteries on them and now they're sealed in. E-waste in a few years.
That's a fair point. Mine will work wired with a USB c if the battery is dead, so there's always that.
Some people hate bluetooth because almost all phone manufacturers have decided to stop including 3.5mm audio ports on new phones, which forces Bluetooth on people. I think this is reasonable because consumer choice is good.
Some people hate it based on not wanting to have to charge their headphones, or wanting something that works when there's a lot of wireless interference in an area they live/work in. Again, fair enough.
Some people hate it based on outdated or poorly understood bullshit repeated by "audiophiles" about how Bluetooth is bad quality. Most people listen to music via compressed as fuck mp3s or streaming services anyway. It's garbage in, garbage out - most modern Bluetooth compression isn't going to do shit. Even if you are listening to your glorious collection of locally stored flac files, most people will find more difference with the tuning of each individual type of earphone than with Bluetooth as a class. Audiophile opinions should be taken with a huge grain of salt because a lot of these people believe in bullshit like $10,000 HDMI cables which objectively present the same signal as a $5 amazon basics cable.
I do hate the loss of 3.5mm jacks. The cheap shit I've bought and the medium shit I've bought have both lasted about the same time, so I buy cheap. And now "cheap" includes more hardware that I have to pay for
This part always gets me. Like, it's digital data transfer - a job that can actually be done perfectly - and the audiophile community acts like you're trying to listen to music over POTS
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I can't speak for anybody, but I usually hear people cite the reason that Bluetooth headphones can't compete with the audio quality of similarly priced analog headphones, because they need extra hardware for Bluetooth as well as a cheap digital audio converter within the headphones to send the analog signal to the speakers
I say this as someone who just uses $30 bluetooth earbuds. I think when What-dot-CD was raided, the audiophile in me died
I think mine sound fine. I don't detect any compression or artifacts. I have an expensive pair of seinheisers that I've had forever. They're fantastic sounding, yeah. But I don't think they sound that much better. Definitely not $100 better sounding. The biggest thing they have going for them is that they do use better materials and they are much more serviceable.
That's how I am with headphones too. I used bottom-end Audio Technica headphones when it meant enough to me to make it worthwhile, but my use-cases have changed since then
Nice headphones are nice and all, but unless you're in audio studio conditions - from the audio input, all the way out to your surroundings - they're pretty moot
My understanding is that until fairly recently, Bluetooth bandwidth and transfer rate stability was so shit that audio playback relied on heavily and variably lossy compression, which made it pointless for audiophile quality headphones. With modern BT specs however I imagine "transparent" (ie non-discernible) compression isn't a problem. Especially if you stream music from Spotify or whatever, then what you get is pretty much equivalent. On most phones it's probably better actually.
Also, having to bundle the DAC and amplifier circuitry into the unit itself is fairly limiting in terms of what you can achieve. Although for the vast majority of users that doesn't really mean anything.
So yeah I imagine the "hate" will dissipate soon enough. I've been happy with my ATH-M50XBT2. I wouldn't bother with anything more high end than that though.
Most Bluetooth headphones still don't let you do stereo and use the microphone at the same time. Your headphones actually have a custom dongle that uses a proprietary signal other than Bluetooth, which probably does let you use both at the same time. Really I wish that proprietary shit they have with more bandwidth would be opened up and replace Bluetooth entirely.
But IMO a good thing about wireless headphones is they actually make better wired headphones. The audio cable is removable whereas on wired headphones it tends to not be. If something happens to the cable on wired headphones you're kinda screwed.