True wireless earbuds don't necessarily have to end up as electronic waste when their batteries reach the end of their lifespan. Fairphone demonstrates this with the Fairbuds 2, whose batteries can be easily replaced. The earbuds also offer active noise cancellation and support for Sony LDAC.
I bought the original fairbuds at launch. I’m not gonna pretend they are good sound quality for music - bass especially is terrible - but they are fine for podcasts and the like.
I’ve had to have one bud - right iirc - replaced under warranty, no hassle beyond the obvious annoyance of it breaking.
When they break again, I’ll likely replace them with whatever version of fairbuds exist then. Ultimately I care more about how fairphone source their materials, the reparebility, and setting a precident, than if a pair of buds I use for maybe 3 hours a week are a bit crap.
Not a glowing review, but yknow.
The new Fairbuds sounds like (pun intended) it’s going to have a better audio quality.
AFAIK there’s an upper limit to how good can they sound anyway because Bluetooth is kinda crap for audio.
I’ve tried telling apart 256 kbps compressed music from uncompressed. I couldn’t do it using wired headphones
Most people cannot. Anyone using Spotify has probably never even gotten into the audio quality settings to change the bitrate as it defaults to Auto. Auto shifts the bitrate down unless you’re on WiFi and you’ve set it to max quality. If you’re on mobile data it goes way down. I’ve had friends who are listening and it sounds awful, you can hear the aub-mp3 quality compression. They never care when I point it out.
Depends upon the codecs supported by all hardware involved. If your sending device supports it, these new buds support decent quality.
I’m not arguing about what is technically possible. I’m arguing about what is practically possible: Samsung (biggest market share) supports LC3 for example, but they can also break it and replace it with their custom codecs to lock people into their ecosystem. Making Sony LDAC the only real choice, and there’s no telling when they will break that too. This means that in practice, only SBC and to a lesser extent AAC and SBC-XQ are the only codecs you know for certain will work.
Bluetooth can support lossless.
Only if both your device and your earbuds both support aptX Lossless, which in practice means it almost never gets used because Samsung (holder of most of the market) does not pay for the licence or enable it in their phones, and the Chinese brands only do so for specific tiers and processors.
That is true. Fairphone 6 supposedly supports lossless, but with e/os it only goes to regular aptX. I have yet to try it with different phone to see if I can spot difference.