My experience was opposite. My car stereo has bluetooth and I would often listen to my phone that way because, well convenient .. one day I accidentally used the wired mode because I was charging my phone from it and boom the improvement in sound quality just blew me away.

I looked into this, and the Bluetooth audio codecs just aren't that good. From heated discussions I have learned that the AirPod ones are in fact lossless because they use a grade of codec that isn't commonly available and thus never actually have to decode/reencode or anything like that. It's digital all the way to your ears.

So maybe bluetooth is "as good as" line quality when you've all the pieces lined up; but line quality can be obtained "for free" at all times with commodity hardware. Just a thought.

> It's digital all the way to your ears.

You mean to say "lossless all the way". Also, it cannot be digital all the way except if you were linking up your aural nerves to the airpod directly. ;)

I guess it depends on whether you define "ears" as "the general vicinity of" or "the actual thing" - I had expected that the former definition was evident but forgot this was HN ...

It's digital all the way to your ears in that you don't need to decode and then reencode, thus eliminating that intermediate "lossy" analogue transition phase. So yeah digital all the way, and by implication "lossless" because of that.

This is almost certainly just a me thing, but just in case: I got some Bluetooth headphones that seemed to sound terrible wired, but it turned out to that the cable had to be pushed and rotated to lock into the headphones at that end. If you really mean atrocious atrocious (and especially if it’s Sennheiser HD 4.40 BT), this might be it?

I haven't noticed a difference between the two modes, this is the pair that I own:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757WVSN8/ref=oh_aui_de...