Officially Going Post-TWS

I mentioned in a past post my plan to get an iPod as part of my move to decentralize some of my EDC tech. While I’m still planning on an iPod build, I do currently have a Hiby R3 II. Kinda forgot about it and I used it today.

I’ve been using a pair of Grado GW100x - open back, on ear, bluetooth headphones. They do sound pretty good and open back can be nice at work (in a factory). The ambient noise is loud enough people don’t hear my headphones leak and as long as I’m not blasting music I can generally hear people around me if I have to, which is pretty rare. Even pre-bluetooth era I’ve used wired Grados like this and they’re really not a bad option for kinda loud environments where you still want some awareness.

Before the bt Grados I was using first gen AirPod Pros, those have been on their way out for a while now and I basically never use them. Even when they were completely operational, I didn’t like all the baggage they come with. Adjusting them in my ear was annoying because I never disabled the controls, ANC squealed, had to wiggle the pods into the case to make sure they actually connected after a while. I’m aware this is some intensely first-world terraforming of mole hills. I’m also aware there are updated versions, things have gotten better, yada yada. None of those things are issues for some dumb wired headphones.

For a quick aside, I will occasionally still use wireless, just in the form of a DAC/Amp, like my Qudelix 5K or streaming to the Hiby. I’m not going to just give up livestreams and YouTube at work.

So my Hiby has a handful of FLAC albums on it including my current favorite, ‘Beyond Words’ by Oregon. Plugged in are a pair of CCA CRAs, which are $20 Chinese IEMs from maybe 2022 or something. No ANC, but with some silicone tips I think it came with, isolation is really decent for my ears. My biggest takeaway though, and why I wanted to write this was, I feel like the quality difference between an ‘Okay’ wired setup with good files vs high quality files to TWS headphones is not close or subtle and for me, wired is just going to win every time.

This topic is a pretty good one for me to point at as one of the primary sources of my hate boner for convenience and frictionless media consumption. Why are we at a place where we’re ok with accepting abject garbage quality because it’s just more convenient? It’d be one thing if muh audiophilia was the only victim but this is the same attitude that’s allowed for the proliferation of Shorts, AI (and otherwise) slop peddling and just everything that sucks.

One of my first, small moves to, with action, stop yearning to be one of the “humans” in Wall-E or a bug that’s fine with whatever noise piping into my head as long as it doesn’t stop and I don’t have to think about where I am - I’m going to plug wired headphones into a thing because it sounds a lot better.