Bluetooth Headphones Will Never Give You the Best Sound Quality
There are some great Bluetooth headphones out there . In the market of headphones dominate AirPods Pro , the Sony-1000XM4 the WF and the Jabra Elite the Active 75T , and headphones Sony WH-1000XM4 and Bose Noise Canceling 700 are among the best headphones with closed ears. That said, while all of these headphones sound in a variety of situations, they will never sound quite as good as wired headphones. That’s why.
Streaming services have recently improved their audio quality. Tidal was one of the first to offer FLAC-based lossless CD-quality streaming for an additional fee, but it was only last year that other services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify (coming soon) offer similar, high-quality lossless bitrate services at the same price as before.
What is sound quality, really?
If these buzzwords mean nothing to you, here’s a deeper explanation: digital music, like all digital products, is made up of digital information (ones and zeros). The more information you put into the file, the better your sound will sound. Ideally, you need as much information as possible so that you can fully enjoy this particular track.
However, information takes place; the more information a file has, the more space it takes up and the more demanding streaming becomes. To solve this problem, streaming services compress files or delete information. It’s strategic; remove enough information to reduce the file size, but leave enough so that most people won’t notice any degradation in the quality of their music.
This is what we mean when we talk about bitrate; it is simply the amount of data that can be transferred with any given file. If the file has a higher bit rate, it can transmit more information, which often results in better quality; if it has a lower bitrate, it transmits less, resulting in poorer quality.
What lossless streaming does is avoid much of this compression to give you a listening experience that is as close to the original recorded material as possible. And now that almost every popular streaming service offers this kind of lossless listening experience, you should be able to use it with any headphone, right?
Why wireless headphones aren’t suitable for wired headphones
Here’s the deal; Bluetooth, the technology that connects wireless headphones to your listening device, has a limit on the bit rate it can work with. It doesn’t matter if you set up your streaming service like Apple Music to play losslessly as these files will be compressed according to what’s possible for that Bluetooth device.
This does not mean that your music will sound bad, quite the opposite. Apple Music, for example, uses the AAC Bluetooth codec to play music through Bluetooth headphones at 256 kbps. Spotify has a maximum bitrate of 320kbps. These bitrates will sound great in your bluetooth headphones.
Even Sony’s gem, the WF-1000XM4, has a maximum bitrate of 990 kbps. While this is about three times that of regular Bluetooth audio, it is still not enough for lossless audio.
On the other hand, wired headphones do not have such a compression problem. They can process the full signal from your listening device, and in some cases it is the listening device that cannot cope with your headphones. Some headphones require extra power to fully appreciate their quality.
This is where a device such as a DAC comes in handy, providing extra power to support both file quality and headphone quality. You need a DAC to enjoy losslessly with the highest bitrates in Apple Music, for example, no matter what wired headphones you have.
Not all wired headphones are created equal
In all fairness, there is a wide selection of wired headphones available. Just because a wire is connected to a pair of earbuds doesn’t mean they will sound better than your AirPods right away.
Many wireless headphones and earbuds are equipped with technology that makes them sound amazing; A cheap pair of faceless wired headphones can receive the lossless signals your streaming service sends, but it’s likely that your AirPods sound much better in their compressed format. It’s not just about the bitrate, but also how these headphones reproduce sound.
Perhaps someday wireless technology will get to the point where we can transmit lossless signals directly to our ears. But for now, this technology refers to wired headphones.