EarPods Are Not the Solution to Making Wireless Earbuds Better

Let me be very clear: I am not young. I’m not old, either. But I am not young. That means there are some things that I just don’t do. I don’t wear big pants, I don’t drink caffeine past 1:30 p.m., and I don’t, under any circumstances, f**k with EarPods. I’m not talking about AirPods, Apple’s wireless earbuds that use Bluetooth to connect to devices sans cable. I’m talking about EarPods, the wired counterpart that connects to your phone via USB-C or a Lightning cable if you’re still stuck in the pre-iPhone 15 age.

If you’re wondering why I have to even state such a thing, let me rewind for a second. Wired earbuds are back, and for some people (mostly people younger than myself), that’s a good thing. Even I, a hater of incredible magnitude, can admit that wired earbuds provide better audio quality in some cases. They often come with dongles for clearer voice quality for calling and they sure as heck cost a lot less than most wireless earbuds. But as I mentioned, I am not young, and unlike people younger than myself, I remember what it was like when I pretty much had to use audio devices with wires on them.

I remember, dear reader, because it sucked. Having to untangle my earbuds every time I extricated them from my pocket was a nightmare. Not just because I’m lazy, but because I almost always listen to music on the subway in New York. I’d challenge anyone to try and untangle a pair of earbuds on a crowded subway and tell me you still love EarPods. That’s why, when I got my first pair of wireless earbuds (a pair from TCL that I was given for free at CES one year), everything changed. They sounded horrible, and I’m pretty sure I misplaced them just as quickly as they came into my life, but being able to just pop a pair of wireless earbuds into my ears and listen to music was a revelation. No screwing around with wires. No slowly strangling myself on the train. Just subpar wireless goodness.

In short, I’m being a grumpy old man about it. This must be how people even older than myself felt about trendy DIY millennials trying to bring cassettes back. You want to rewind this plastic piece of garbage every time you listen to something? All for what… an aesthetic? Oh, you romanticize physical media? Get rid of Spotify then, I dare you. But I’m not just being a grumpy old man about it, I’m being a well-thought-out grumpy old man about it, because what I want isn’t just a pair of earbuds sans wires, it’s a pair that sounds as good, or nearly as good, as one with wires.

If you’re using standard Bluetooth connections, that’s a pretty tall order. Streaming audio via Bluetooth automatically compresses files, and as a result of that compression, quality (digital information) gets degraded. That being said, there are more tools now (codecs, they’re called) to keep that compression to a minimum. There’s LDAC (Lossless Digital Audio Codec), which was developed by Sony and transmits 3x more data than Bluetooth. Apple has its own equivalent called ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), and you can see where this is going. The variations in codecs make for an annoying hi-res streaming experience. There isn’t one unified hi-res codec, so you have to know which is available on your device. Sure, you could plug a dongle into your iPhone to stream via LDAC or its counterpart, AptX, but I’m pretty sure I lost 99% of you the second I said dongle. And I’m with you.

It should be easier to get “hi-res†audio wirelessly through your phone, especially because the people who make the audio hardware we use have spent many, many hours refining wireless headphones and wireless earbuds to sound as clean and distortion-free as possible. In fact, streaming wirelessly via Bluetooth should be better all around, given it’s the predominant way we listen to things. On that front, there are some improvements in the pipeline.

Starting in 2023, Qualcomm began pushing toward a wireless earbuds chip (the S7 Pro) that allows for playback via Bluetooth but also Wi-Fi. That’s significant for a couple of reasons. One of the main ones being that Wi-Fi offers a more compression-free streaming experience than Bluetooth. It also means you don’t have to be within 20 feet of the device you’re streaming from, since it relies on the blanketing from your router to transmit data. Now, thanks to what Qualcomm is calling XPAN, which is short for “Expanded Personal Area Network,†a better, more seamless switching between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi listening is possible, though Qualcomm still needs to get hardware makers on board before we can all use that tech. It’s not a perfect solution since you can’t exactly take that on the go with you, but it’s a step in the right direction.

And as for the better microphone part of things, there has been at least some progress on that front, too. This year Nothing released its Ear 3 wireless earbuds that come with a feature called Super Mic. The idea here is that you can use your case as a better, clearer microphone that mimics the mic dongles on the wired earbuds of yore. I wasn’t impressed with the Super Mic in practice (the mic quality wasn’t exactly super all the time), but there’s promise in that idea. Maybe Nothing won’t be the company to nail down better mic quality, but someone else might.

The point is, wireless streaming via Bluetooth is slowly but surely improving, and if you use wired earbuds for lower latency, or better sound, or you just like the way they look, then that’s fine. Do your thing. But for me, convenience is king, and luckily, for the rest of us who feel the same way but still want hi-res audio too, we might not have to go running back to the rat’s nest of cables for relief just yet. For us, what we really want is just a more perfect pair of wireless earbuds.