My $30 pair of bluetooth headphones have never caused me any issues. I have a more expensive pair but that is because I wanted another set designed for running so they don't fall out. Both work fine and neither requires any further investment should I choose to move to the iPhone 7. I really don't see the issues here. The audio jack had a good run and it was always going to be met with resistance regardless of when they decided to remove it or what they decided to replace it with. This same thing can be said for any technology that is changed.
To me, this really is a non-issue as wireless is the way of the future. Bluetooth/<insert wireless tech here> will not receive due attention until a major player in the industry forces innovation to fix the shortcomings of the protocol. How long was it before we received the bluetooth 4.0 spec with low power mode?
I appear to be in the minority given the recent backlash against Apple, but something tells me this will wash over in 3-4 months as folks forget about it and move on.
-Josh
The 3.5 is analog. All other manners that they are conveying your music is digital. To break it down for those that don't know the difference:
Bluetooth audio protocol is lossy, meaning that some of the data is lost. However, it is digital, meaning that the audio reproduction in the headset is bit-exact the same data that was transmitted.
The data is encoded to a digital format that is compressed in a way that loses some of the source data (but hopefully not enough that you can perceive it); but the data stream is much more resilient to interruption, due to buffering, which means that you are unlikely to notice even if some other electromagnetic frequency transmission interferes with your bluetooth (temporarily).
Analog audio over a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (technically called a "TRS" connector) can be very high quality if the audio playback device has a good DAC. An amplifier (separate or built-in) can make the signal sound even better. A good pair headphones can sound amazing with this dated analog mode of transmitting audio down a cable. If you are using a very high quality DAC on the source audio device, chances are it's better than the DAC that has to be in the bluetooth headphones to convert the bluetooth digital data to analog, because the in-headphones DAC is limited by battery power and size constraints -- but a sound card in a computer is much less constrained. Even sound chips in smartphones are great these days.
All analog audio is subject to interference with the audio cable. Most audio cables are not shielded from external electromagnetic interference, and certain models of computers (especially Core 2 Duo era CPUs with on-board graphics) have been known to spew electromagnetic frequencies that are picked up as a "grinding" or "buzzing" noise on the analog headphone wire, if it is near enough to the computer. Some LCDs can do the same. Depending on your situation, this interference can be even worse than the loss of audio quality of bluetooth's lossy encoding.
So to people that care about quality, and download/want to have access to WAV, FLAC, and ALAC because they aren't lossy.
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