Technology and Entertainment are two things that can make even young adults feel decrepit. Headphones, to an extent a combination of the two certainly did so recently.
It was a blink and you miss it moment. Or rather a sequence of those. As I realized that all the people wearing headphones around me had gone fully wireless. Airpods and their ripoffs, little beans discreetly hidden behind hairstyles. The one brave soul with over ear headphones with cat ears. Nary a cable in sight.
As someone who still remembers looking at the silhouette Apple commercials and thinking they were the height of modernity, the entire thing felt almost surreal. A blink, and that’s as old fashioned as the contemporary iMac G3.
And then I felt one of the pockets of my backpack. There they are, a purchase from just after the world ended. KZ ZSN’s. On recommendation from a strange australian man with a pet snake for company. I wasn’t looking for new headphones. My phone came with a set of perfectly serviceable ones. But one feature trumped them all. The freedom from needless waste.
Most of my IEM’s died of a similar fate. At some point, that little strand of wire taking the electrical impulses from the source where they were to be translated into voice or music would break. And then I’d spent the next two weeks or so contorting the cable in ever-more awkward positions until finally I had to admit that no, it was no longer going to work out.
But these ones come with a detachable cable. Meaning when that does happen, and it will take a while thanks to the robust included cable, I just have to throw it away instead of everything. Replace, repeat. Add one of those surprisingly good $9(at the time) Apple lightning to 3.5mm adapters and I’m ready. No batteries, no need to charge anything, no $200 repeat purchases when the battery dies and the manufacturer’s official response is “lol”. All of that and only minor tugging if I’m sloppy and don’t take care while moving about.
Disadvantages? Well, the microphone is hot garbage. The only time I didn’t get any complaints about it I got curious and asked the other person. They confirmed it was horrible but they just accepted it as normal. I thought there was something to be learned there about people and their ability to just suck up horrendous circumstances, but it’s probably for the best that I didn’t try and build on that. Besides which, as far as I can tell, while there are replacement cables, none of them seem to be blessed with a microphone good enough to be called “usable”.
But Apart from that and the aforementioned surprise yanks when moving around, I’m getting excellent sound quality at a great price and that will work so long as copper is copper, electricity is electricity and air can vibrate. All of those cheap Bluetooth headphones being thrown out may come to bite us in the future. And when they do and we see images of mountains of unrecyclable plastics and batteries polluting hitherto hidden waterways, I’ll hear about it on the wired wireless.
Even if by then I have to get some strange magnetic NFC puck to 3.5mm., which is something I find distressingly close to a possible reality.
