Hello,
I’ve been using a pair of $20 no-name BT earbuds from Amazon for the last few years and they worked well enough for me, but the quality is starting to show in physical problems. The electronics still work fine but the charging ports have come loose etc. It’s time for new earbuds and I would appreciate input.
I use the earbuds only with an Android phone (Google Pixel 6 Pro), and I don’t use the assistant or AI or voice commands. My current earbuds have a terrible microphone so I can’t make calls with them - improving this would maybe be nice but is not a big deal.
Features:
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Price - Under $150 maybe? Soft limit I guess
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Touch controls of some kind - mandatory. (start stop, volume)
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Wireless charging of the case/battery pack - very cool, would be nice. Not mandatory
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Case charging connector - USB-C I guess but Micro USB is fine. No Proprietary chargers because I tend to lose cables
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Built-in assistant / AI / voice control - I won’t use it and I don’t want it. As long as I can ignore it I don’t care what features of this type are included
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Noise cancelling - Some is better than none but I don’t need ultra-deluxe sound deadening 2000 pro 2.0
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Sound quality - don’t care. I’m not an audiophile, and I can’t tell the difference between bitrates. I mostly listen to spoken podcasts and audiobooks, only occasionally music
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Toughness - I won’t wear them in the pool or in a sandstorm. I dropped the current ones only vary rarely
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Shape - I prefer the replaceable rubber ear tips (what are they actually called?) to the hard nubs
Fairbuds.
That’s the current best Bluetooth ear buds with user replaceable batteries that can be found at your budget. But they’ll be used.
Beyond that, check out ifixit for their repairability reviews. But you won’t be paying 150 for anything else, even used. Lowest I’ve seen fairbuds go for is about a hundred, and they were in good shape. Lowest I’ve seen the repairable Sonys reach is about 200, used. And don’t ask about the bang & olufsen set, which is pretty much the best out there overall that’s repairable, though I’d have to look up that model.
With true wireless buds, you either pay for crap that’s useless when the battery fails (unless you’re seriously skilled with rebuilding such things), or you pay out the nose for stuff you can keep going. What really sucks is that the prices on the better ones that you can’t repair aren’t even lower than the repairable options.
Having seen people go through high priced buds in a year or two and then the buds essentially die because they won’t hold a charge, there’s no way in hell I’d ever spend more than about thirty on a set that I can’t swap them out without soldering. But you gotta pay up for the ones worth having, or be patient and be willing to buy used. Sometimes you can run across refurbished buds from repairable models as well, and they tend to hit about 3/4 of the original price.
That’s good advice, thank you very much.
Which Sony’s are repairable?
It’s the Wf-1000xm3.
How is the sound sync? Ive been keeping an eye on their forum for a while and one thing I keep seeing is when watching videos, the sound to video synchronisation is enough to cause unhappy customers, I’d love to get some at some point but thats a significant wrinkle
On the fairbuds, I don’t own them, I’ve only used them on loan for a few days.
That being said, I didn’t notice any sync issues on YouTube, or the one movie I watched via HBO’s service.