With completely wireless earbuds, the rule is: when the battery fails, they have to be disposed of. Not so with the Fairbuds, that allow you to replace batteries in just a few seconds. Combined with a repairable design, the earbuds should therefore have an extremely long lifetime.
As a DJ and audiophile in general, yeah I’m not thrilled on headphones using batteries and Bluetooth. I’ll give up my hard-line when I’m dead.
Sure, some wireless for exercise or casual use is fine. Full deal breaker if I’m performing though.
You’re doing DJ performance from a phone?
Towards the end of my DJ’ing career, I was to the point of showing up to a venue (that had an existing sound system) on my motorcycle with my controller, headphones, microphone (that didn’t smell like beer breath) and laptop in a backpack. I’d just plug in and go. But even then the idea of DJ’ing from just a phone or tablet seemed weird to me. I understood the appeal of it but…
The sticking point for most people is stereo. When you throw on AC/DC, you expect to hear the guitar out of the just one speaker but when DJ’ing a large room that doesn’t work. Half the room hears the guitar and the other half just hears high hat. So you end up flipping the mono switch, ya know, just for that one song. Then eventually you’ve done three gigs in a row and realize that it’s been mono the whole time and no-one noticed, not even you.
Headphones jacks have two audio out channels. We typically think of them as left and right, but they aren’t, that’s just how most people use them. Once you get past the mono idea, you realize you have two distinct audio outputs on your phone or tablet. If the music software can do the mono summing instead of the mixer, then then you can hook the “left” output cable to mixer ch 1, and the “right” to ch 2, and play different songs out each. Make sure the same output of the mixer goes to both speakers and you’re in business. You just need dj’ing software that can play two different songs at the same time on your phone and interface with a controller, probably via bluetooth.
Now you can show up to a party with just your phone that you were already carrying anyway, plug in to their controller, and make a surprise appearance.
It still weirds me out, but modern phones have the horsepower to do this. They certainly don’t have the disk space for a terabyte library, so you aren’t going to work a six hour wedding with an iphone, but there are TB SD cards so certain Androids could certainly do this.
There’s probably also software that will do everything over bluetooth so a completely wireless phone could work.
I’ve been out of the game for over a decade. I can’t imagine how far the controllers and software have come and don’t want to find out because I’m sure my poor wallet can’t handle it.
I’m not a DJ, but I can listen to high end audio from 3.5mm, even a phone, and you just can’t over Bluetooth. Its lossy janky and barely a standard.
AptX over Bluetooth is lossless and has been available since 2016. Android only though.
My experience of Bluetooth has always been settings that I can’t change, security issues, and devices that run different implementations on both ends. See ‘barely a standard’, even when the box for each reads the same standard number.
Which is why I’m so reluctant to call it a standard; it isnt standardized.
No, it isn’t. It just has higher bitrates, but still not enough for lossless.
If that’s true it seems like the name is fooling people
https://www.whathifi.com/advice/aptx-lossless-what-is-the-breakthrough-bluetooth-codec-how-can-you-get-it
Saying that AptX is lossless since 2016 is blatantly false. And yes, just like with HDMI and USB, AptX standard naming and Qualcomm feature naming schemes are a misleading mess.
There are 4 flavours of AptX (linked article states this as well), and only the latest supports lossless, but is available only on very few chipsets and devices so I even forget that it exists, because for all practical purposes it doesn’t.
Denon Perl Pro, Bose earbuds and Cambridge Audio M100 are the only non-chinese earphones that I know of that support AptX lossless and the latter are not even listed by my local importer. Plus, you need a very specific (expensive) phone to use them because AptX Lossless is not available for all chipsets. Basically, Asus ROG 8 or Xiaomi Redmi K70 Pro for ones available to buy for me, and then it’s not available at every retailer, either, and the b2b wholesalers I have access to through work only list ROG Phone 8 (~1200€ retail).
In conclusion, to make use of lossless AptX you have to jump through many hoops and spend a lot of money—700+€ phone and the 200+€ earphones. The standard is far from being, well, a standard; common and widespread. 99,9% of devices on sale and in use by people only support older AptX standards, mostly AptX HD (which is not lossless!).