Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Please recommend more amazing headphones that meet the basic specs that the NCH 700/WX-/AirPods Max have:

- 20 hours battery life

- wireless

- noise cancellation

- has microphone(s)

Does audio quality matter that much when they have to work with bluetooth where the bandwidth will be halved whenever you have to use the microphone?



Well designed Bluetooth audio can be indistinguishable from wired. There needs to be good codec support on both ends and strong signal quality. All Bluetooth codecs are lossy, but the higher bitrate ones should not be perceptually different from lossless. Most of the problems with bad Bluetooth come from the SBC codec(degrades badly with low signal quality) or bad implementations. One advantage Apple has is that their AAC codec can transmit without any recompression if you are using an AAC source file. I have a Fiio Bluetooth dongle that uses LDAC with nice headphones and IEMs and I can absolutely not hear a difference with wired.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/what-you-need-to-kno...

And by the way, the Bose and Sony's are considered top of the line for noise canceling wireless headphones. You absolutely lose sound quality from the noise canceling though, so that feature is a trade-off. Airpod Max may well be a contender, though it is not out yet, so it's premature to give it the noise canceling crown.


https://www.amazon.com/Mpow-Cancelling-Headphones-Bluetooth-...

It's not strictly fair because you asked for 20 hours, and these do 30, so perhaps disqualified.

I use a similar model MPOW at home. They sound great! Not like audiophile perfect great, but good enough. I have a kid who likes to play with everything, so $500 headphones are a big no. I'm not arguing that these are dumb, or overpriced, or anything, I don't really care. But there are decent alternatives in this space already.



Sorry for double reply, I did not do heavy research but just going through Amazon’s recommendations and identifying good audiophile brands, here is what I found:

$200

https://www.amazon.com/WH-1000XM3-Wireless-canceling-Headset...

$300

https://www.amazon.com/Senheisser-Momentum-Cancelling-Headph...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08K3TWS4W/ref=sspa_mw_detail...

$500

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07RHWDY9N/ref=sspa_mw_detail...

I really really don’t think Apple is going to make better headphones than Sennheiser and Shure, or even Sony. I’m particularly intrigued by the Sony XM4’s battery life of 30 hours, and 10 minute charge that gets it a 5 hour charge. The worst thing about all day use of wireless headphones is that it will just die on you if you have a podcast or music on in the background all day.


Sennheiser Momentum 3




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: