>>1055279
>I'm not even an audiophile
I don't consider myself one either, it seems like an empty term to me.
>, yet I came to the realization a few years ago that Bluetooth headphones are shit compared wired headphones.
Now you've done it
Can you elaborate? After using open back over ear gaymen headphones like the Sennheiser PC 360 G4ME for the longest time, I switched to wired in ear monitors like the highly overpriced Shure SE215 and Sennheiser IE40 Pro for the sake of some sound isolation. I even bought into the Chi-Fi cheap chinese IEM meme with the inexpensive KZ ZS10 Pro (Which did sound better than the shure or sennheisers.)
That changed some years ago when by chance I picked up the Sony WI-C310 for around those 15 eurobucks at what you might consider european walmart. I was looking for something wireless that would allow me to get up and go take a shit and such without unplugging the earphones from the computer while listening to some tunes. Initially I expected nothing much of them, having gone through many raspy sounding over ear bluetooth headphones. But when I listened to them for a while I was impressed by the sound quality that these things have for some inexplicable reason, they are what I've been using almost exclusively since then for the last three years.
- 17 hour battery life thanks to the neckband design, all while weighting almost nothing, with 3 hours charging time for a full charge.
- Measured sound quality is better than the Shure SE215 and Sennheiser IE40 Pro IEMs mentioned before, and also better than all the true wireless meme buds costing upwards of 200$ for some reason like the Sony WF-1000XM5.
- The only downside I see with the cheap price is the resulting poor build quality of the wiring and the plastic casings, not the drivers themselves. I've gone through maybe three spare units in these past years whenever the ones I was using died for whatever reason, even then I could just send them back under the two year warranty and use the refunded money to buy another unit.
It's kind of retarded, I know. But it works
- Despite bluetooth audio latency being supposedly so bad you can't play vidya with them due to the delay, on linux It's never been an issue for me with these. I did test these against certain other bluetooth earphones which have the now deprecated AptX low latency codec, and while it did make a difference and the audio delay was even lower, after going back to these it wasn't something that bugged me.
What I don't understand is why people don't wear the neckband earphones like pic related, they just droop them over their neck and hope they don't fall out, when you could just cross tie them around your neck before wearing them to prevent them from falling out.
The trick to getting the most juice out of any inexpensive bluetooth audio speakers or headphones is forcing the operating system of whatever device you're playing the audio from to use the default SBC codec with a higher bitrate, also called SBC-XQ (Stands for XtraQuality I guess.) Every bluetooth audio device made in the last decade should support SBC in some capacity by default, so if you can up the bitrate to the "SBC-XQ" levels by switching to it somehow, and the audio works, you're good to go. On linux when using pipewire you should be able to see it as an option when right clicking the device in the bluetooth manager. On rooted android you can use a magisk module that increases the SBC bitrate.
Also, when using earphones or even headphones, as opposed to speakers, stereo fatigue can be an issue. I've found that using a crossfeed filter can improve the listening experience. Enabling crossfeed allows the left and right audio channels to blend into eachother in a similar way as if you were sitting in front of two speakers on either sides in front of you. When using stereo heaphones, or worse in ear monitors without crossfeed, it can sound as if the intruments are spaced too far apart, leaving nothing much in the center, due to the passive soundstage being almost nonexistent when the drivers are jammed straight into your ear canal, as opposed to perceiving the sound around your ears.
Or something like that*
I just want good portable audio at a decent cost. If I one day move innawoods, I'll just switch to speakers when blasting Megalith on full volume while mowing the lawn, but until then this will have to do. Also recently the WI-C310 seems to have been discontinued and replaced with the Sony WI-C100, which I've yet to try. I'll probably get a few pairs of those once the current WI-C310 units I have start failing.
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wi-c310-wireless (Sony WI-C310 tests)
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sennheiser/ie-40-pro (Sennheiser IE40 Pro tests)
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/shure/se215 (Shure SE215 tests)
https://perrivanaudio.com/kz-zs10-pro/ (KZ ZS10 Pro tests)
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wf-1000xm5-truly-wireless (Sony WF-1000XM5 tests, it's an overpriced meme that costs 200$.)
https://forum.hifiguides.com/t/sbc-xq-when-sbc-is-better-than-ldac-since-2019/42108 (SBC-XQ can sound better than LDAC)
http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/1452517 (Audio quality of SBC XQ Bluetooth audio codec)
https://github.com/Audio4Linux/JDSP4Linux (JamesDSP equalizer for linux with crossfeed)
https://xdaforums.com/t/jamesdsp-audio-manager-mmt-ex.3607970/ (JamesDSP for android with crossfeed)
https://xdaforums.com/t/magisk-module-sbc-xq-bluetooth-audio-codec-and-drc-deactivator-android-10.4332799/ (SBC-XQ for android through magisk)
https://btcodecs.valdikss.org.ru/sbc-encoder/ (Bluetooth A2DP SBC/aptX online encoder, allows you to simulate what your audio would sound like when encoded to bluetooth codecs right in your browser.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfeed (About crossfeed)
https://bs2b.sourceforge.net/ (Crossfeed DSP)