What are the pros & cons of wireless headphones (Beats & Bose)? Is it better to go with wired headphones?
One way to think about it is to understand that all digital signals need to be converted to an analog signal in order to be played back.
Wired headphones are purely analog by design, which means that your audio source (laptop, phone, ipod, A/V receiver) is doing the digital-to-analog conversion and the headphones are just reproducing the analog signal as sound. This usually means that wired headphones deliver better sound quality because most of the cost is going towards producing high-quality drivers that reproduce sound as well as possible. This also means you can hook up the headphone to a superior source (e.g. a dedicated DAC) which will result in even better sound quality.
With a wireless headphone, the digital-to-analog conversion is happening in the headphone, and the constraints of space and cost usually mean that the conversion is not as high-quality. Given the same cost as a wired set of headphones, a good portion of the cost is going towards the electronics of transmitting and receiving the wireless signal and then converting that into an analog signal. Plus, wireless signals are not always 100% reliable so you might get signal drop-outs, interference, and other more obvious compromises in audio-quality.
Practically, wireless headphone do give you more freedom to move about (as all wireless devices do), but they're usually heavier as well because they have to store more *stuff* in the same general form factor.
Long story short: If sound quality is ultimately the most important to you, then go wired; if you prioritize convenience over everything else, go wireless.
I'd also recommend brands other than Bose and Beats because lots of better options exist at that price point (Sennheiser, Audio-Technica, Shure, etc.)
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