If lossless and sound quality matter enough, use a portable dac with wired headphones. Otherwise, accept the compromises of using Bluetooth.
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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I have a bit of an amateur headphone collection and my favorite way to listen to music is my trusty old Sennheiser hd650 (thanks to dankpods I now exclusively pronounce it huu duuh 650) headphones and either a desktop tube amp if I’m listening from my laptop or the equally trusty portable fiio a5 headphone amp for listening from my phone. It takes a usb-c to female 3.5mm adapter from my phone then a short 3.5mm male-male into the amp and standard 3.5mm output on the amp for plugging in the headphone. It is certainly not ergonomic or comfortable to carry around and hold the amp with my phone but if I’m playing like tidal master quality audio or even apple music’s high definition lossless the difference between this wired setup and even pricier bluetooth headphones is clear as far as fidelity. I stupidly got the apple airpods max a while back and I mean they’re fine they’re good but you can obviously tell where apple engineered around bluetooth limitations. Spatial audio (apple’s proprietary stereo surround tech) is nice to mimic a reasonable soundstage in them but my sennies with the big loud power hungry driver and open back design makes it sound natural and pair it with a high bitrate lossless song it always sounds better on them. I also have a pair of bluetooth capable ath-150s but always use them wired. Allegedly the airpods max supports full quality if you wire them to an iPhone using a particular cable that apple sells but like… lmao common
HD650 rocks. Getting close to having to replace the pads again but the hardware is rock solid and sounds great.
Oh yeah I had the same issue with those pads especially since I sweat a lot I ended up ordering some Chinesium brand off Amazon and the first pair had one that just refused to fit it was slightly incorrectly sized so Amazon sent a replacement they fit fine but yes unfortunately those pads get worn real quick and the official Sennheiser replacement ones are expensive even today
On an unrelated note if you happen to have any headphones you would suggest to add to my collection that are good in the same way those are let me know
This is your only realistic option, IMHO.
There has been some attempts like Qualcomm Aptx-lossless but the hardware support, compatibility and reliability it’s lacking . It’s good companies are working on it but we still are a few years from getting it right.
I got big Shure headphones supporting aptX HD (and that Sony codec) both to my little NAD amp and my phone. The Sony earbuds only support the proprietary Sony lossless codec and only to the phone, but they're for walking around, so that's fine.
It's not hard if you just make this a requirement when picking your kit.
Obviously no Apple stuff.
Bluetooth 5 is 2mbps. The actual throughput is closer to 1.4mbps, which is just enough to get CD quality lossless audio though provided that the transmitter and headphones both support a lossless codec.
If you want to listen to anything higher quality than a CD, get a good DAC and wired headphones.
There are wifi headphones too tho?
Yup they use their own receiver and 2.4gz network usually I believe.
Bluetooth connection is lossy, with the exception of some Sony proprietary shitcodecs that can rarely actually maintain a stable enough connection to stay in lossless mode.
Whether you'll actually hear any difference is a different question, but the answer is maybe. The Bluetooth codecs are generally low quality, despite opus already existing and being on paper really good for the job (and implemented by pipewire but nothing else unfortunately). Bluetooth instead standardized some patent encumbered codecs with high licensing fees that are only about as good as or possibly worse than mp3. They also have very high latency and using them to watch videos of people talking sucks
LDAC is great dunno what you're complaining about. It's also in AOSP
LDAC suffers from high latency and very steep degradation once the strength of the Bluetooth connection drops even slightly. In some case it can drop to around 330kbps, which makes it no better than SBC unless you can guarantee a rock solid connection at all times.
LDAC is lossy.
Its encoder is. A decoder requires royalty fees. Not too terrible tbh but a fully open codec is still preferrable.
I've found it preferable in general to use wired earbuds tbh. I made sure to buy a phone with a 3.5mm jack. Wired buds are cheaper, don't need recharging, don't add latency or have dropouts or pairing nuisance, etc. Yeah there are wires but IMHO that beats the alternative.
If you care about audio quality, there isn't anything better than wired earphones + DAC, in ears monitors are pretty good, or if you want something better I would go for a pair of professional headphones.
Not in my experience. Might as well just use mp3s.
320kbps mp3 sounds pretty much exactly the same as lossless anyway.
I agree, take the mp3s and Bluetooth over wired!
I tried a few blind tests myself and it was like a 55/45 I chose the mp3 😂
Edit: added blind
Yup, I don't understand the need for lossless, but I guess it's just a fun hobby thing.