I would probably prefer having a headphone jack. I am using wireless buds though. The problem with them is the price. While you can get decent wired earbuds for around $100 or even slightly less you have to pay at least $300 for decent wireless ones. Seriously I tried a few, but they all sounded like absolute garbage. It’s probably a cheap DAC in all of them combined with even less available space due to batteries and other electronics.
Another downside is that you can only use them for like 5 hours at a time. It is fine most of the time, but on long train rides I hit the limitation a few times.
Overall I am happy with the wireless ones, they are convenient, but it is really expensive to replace them and you have fewer choices, so having wired headsets as an option would be great.
I never tried wireless Bluetooth interfaces though and I suspect they might be better than the inbuilt jack of phones which would make them obsolete in my opinion.
As someone who currently uses headphones throughout pretty much all his free time, yes I use wired whenever possible and my current phone was one I got because of the headphone jack. Last thing I want is to have to stop listening to whatever I’m listening to all because my bluetooth headphones need a charge.
Currently I’m stuck with a pair of shitty dollar store headphones, but they are so much better than the wireless ones I have because of just how long I can enjoy music, videos, etcetera, without needing to worry when my headphone battery needs charged. A headphone jack is extremely important to me.
I finally tried a little Bluetooth amp and found my wired earphones sound better than they ever did plugged into the phone directly. Couldn’t hear an improvement when plugging into the usb port and using as a usb DAC. So i guess the high quality ldac codec must be kinda good.
Would still prefer the 3.5mm option of course - much more useful for aux out.
I used to be quite hardline on this, however now I use a portable DAP (Hiby R5 Gen 2) for my music. It has a class A amplifier, balanced output, a Terabyte of storage, and streams Qubuz Hi-Res. So I don’t use my phone now.
I ended up getting Bluetooth headphones when I upgraded my Pixel. I deliberated over it for AGES.
Charging them is less annoying than I thought it would be (I bought my headphones in January and have only had to charge them about 4 times??) but it annoys me that you can’t just plug them in and they work. Talking to anyone on the phone using them is terrible. Bluetooth cuts out sometimes, randomly. I miss my wired headphones :(
I much prefer wireless headphones, because I keep breaking every plug. I even tried soldering them, but that ended in a catastrophe lol. That being said, I recently lost my wireless pair and had to pick my old K450. Now I’m grateful that I picked a phone with a headphone jack. I wasn’t even checking if it has one while buying.
I’m not a fan of BT headphones. It’s three things (2 pods and the case that charges them) that you have to juggle and keep charged, vs just one that works whenever the device it’s plugged into works. Wired headphones have a nice additional perk of discouraging people from interacting with you, while (at least anecdotally) the BT ones seem to lose that deterrent… and the venn diagram for times I want to use headphones and the times I don’t want to deal with other people is just one crisp circle.
I always try to pick out a phone that has a 3.5mm jack, but that’s becoming increasingly hard to do.
I use a Samsung galaxy note 9 which has a Jack because i want a Jack. I replaced the screen twice after it broke just not to buy a diff phone. Fyi note 10 comes without a Jack
I haven’t used wired since around 2013, and would have switched to jack-less if available at that time. I don’t understand the “anti-consumer” theories around their removal. Most people who end up buying phones without jacks end up buying BT headphones from a manufacturer other than the phone one. Unless you think there’s a conspiracy where Sony and Bose are giving kickbacks to Samsung and Apple…
My current phone does not have a jack and my previous one did. I would prefer to have it since there are times I don't need/want noise cancelling and bluetooth, but I have no choice but to run down my headphone batteries more.
Add comment