Latency. When you're making music and interacting with it directly, you can't afford any noticeable latency. When you're passively listening to it, that doesn't really matter. For phone/tablet users the main place this matters is games, due to their interactive nature.

And price: a jack is dumb tech and cheap (cheap anough that I always had about 10 extra jacks of all kinds with me when I was doing a gig).

But to be fair, wireless transmitters/receivers do exist for musicians. They don't use bluetooth ofc, but that means that the latency can be bearable with wireless. It's made for live playing though (freedom of movement), no point using that in studio

The bluetooth implementations all suck. My $40k car is about as reliable and predictable from a bluetooth perspective as Chinese knock-off Jawbone copycat from 2007.

Who decided to use such a flaky protocol for audio and such, and then remove the reliable connection?

Add to that great complexity at Layer 1, and constantly changing specs. Bluetooth 1, 2, and 4 are all radically different than each other.

Compare with WiFi, which only has to do one thing (Layer 1-2). Cellular is much more complex, but that's why releasing a new phone involves endless rounds of (usually mandatory and very strict) carrier certification.

I want non crappy Bluetooth mice that don't require a separate USB dongle. :(

Edit: To be clear, I'm sure ethernet cables are an entirely different thing and there's actually a very good reason why wireless makes everything more complicated. But, well, maybe that's one of the reasons people would like to stick with wires.

Everyone gets what they want, except for the end user!

Even though wireless transmitters have gotten a lot better than previous times (in the 1980s one of the Spinal Tap spoofs was getting radio interference in their wireless guitar system if I recall correctly), now using similar frequency bands wi-fi does with proprietary protocols from what I see (definitely not Bluetooth!)... you still see reviews of reliability problems in some circumstances. You'd definitely want to carry around a standard guitar cable as a backup if you have one.

Moving parts and physical connections are fragile. Wireless connections solve that fragility. Agreed that pairing sucks, but that's a solvable problem.

The music industry standard for instrument cables is 1/4" TS for unbalanced instrument audio, 1/4" TRS for a few things like monitoring headphones, and XLR cables for most everything else. XLR in particular is a very durable system, unless you get a very badly made XLR cable or jack I would never call this system "fragile". Even 1/4" is quite an improvement durability wise over 3.5mm.

XLR is not exactly a very portable jack, but a mini-XLR jack does exist -- not as portable as TRS 3.5mm, of course. But if increasing jack durability is such a concern on a more portable device, this connector is an option. Same with using 1/4" TRS, this is a connector which has the advantage of having more headphone options with this option built in (most headphones marketed for studios should be 1/4" TRS or at least have that option).

None of the above are as portable as 3.5mm and I think this connector is "durable enough" to where I doubt it is such a priority for most phone consumers to give up some phone thickness for better durability. But in professional music applications there is a reason why 3.5mm is relatively rare.

I mean, at some level, come on and use your imagination. People riding the metro don't always have total control over getting their belongings situated properly when the train's packed and there's a lot of bustling around. I assure you this experience is not unique to me.

So, I guess there are tradeoffs -- and fixing pairing means everyone can enjoy freedom from one more wire, while keeping on using a wire means we keep adapting our behaviors around a wire.

So I end up needing to find a CRT to play them.

I also saw this on the Nintendo Wii emulations of SNES games on new flatscreens.

1. The amount of lag is consistent (check, as long as you're not using Bluetooth)

2. The game is not key-sounded (pass for DDR)

3. You know how much lag there is.

Since rhythm games are deterministic, you can just offset the visuals and audio output to compensate for the delay. Keysounded games are imperfect, but it's rarely an issue unless there's a lot of lag.

The real problem is #3. Without extra, expensive equipment, there's no way to know exactly how much lag there is. It's annoying that the only real problem comes down to an inability to measure.

You'd think HDMI would be able to use ARC to send a signal back, since the TV would know the exact moment it is displaying the image.

Unfortunately, no one with the resources to really tackle this problem seems to care enough to do it.

I should also note that what many games do do is offer some type of user calibration, ie, press the notes with as good timing as you can manage, and we'll assume the average is the amount of delay in your setup. This kind of works sometimes, but it's imperfect for obvious reasons.

After going through the rigmarole of choosing a new TV recently, TV manufacturers seem very keen on discouraging actual comparison of specifications.

This wouldn't work for most games, because in, say, Mario Kart, the world needs to immediately react to the player's input. But in a Rhythm game, no one will notice if the visual feedback comes in a few ms late, as long as inputs are being read at the perceived-correct time. (Delayed audio feedback may be slightly noticeable in particularly bad cases, hence my note about key-sounded games.)

N.B.

1. This doesn't make the timing window more forgiving. Presses made at +0ms are counted as too early, because it is too early on the player's display.

2. I say "display" for simplicity, but IRL it's often a mistake to assume that audio and the display are delayed by equal amounts.

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Edit: To be clear, you can't fix this—the developer has to add user-adjustable latency settings. PS2 games designed for zero-latency CRTs and will never work properly on laggy LCD screens.

New games, however, usually let you adjust for latency. Although, they often make the mistake of not accounting for audio latency, or not allowing visuals and audio to be adjusted separately.

Btw, I've heard that the newer Rockband games in particular can auto calibrate for latency via hardware built into the peripherals.

It's still pretty depressing that they've added so much cruft that the overhead and resultant lag are an issue at all.

For comparison, for Virtual Reality ≤ 20 milliseconds is usually considered the target latency.

And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Remember, this is lag added by the television software, not the PS2 system. We know this because if you take the pure hardware approach of component cables, there's no noticeable lag.

VR has an excuse. VR has to do an expensive computation to decide where all the pixels have to appear to seem real to the human eye. The TV just has to take a signal and display it on the screen. That's the identity function.

>And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Rather, they couldn't have predicted slowness of upscaling and refusal to implement an optimize-for-time option.

This can be solved if both earbuds connect directly to the main device, no? This is how the Airpods work.

Aside from exercise, there isn't one.

OTOH, as you note, there are a large number of serious drawbacks -- battery failures being the biggest and most obvious. The other thing is that, heretofore, you could rely on a dumb audio jack if you wanted to play music with almost any device. Now you're limited to things with Bluetooth, and you have to extend some amount of trust in making that connection.

I use almost exclusively higher-end headphones -- say, $300 and up. Bluetooth has effectively zero presence in that market. There's a reason for this.

I also own AirPods, but their job is about 60% gym and 40% conversations. For serious listening, I reach for the Grados or the Etymotics or the Sennheisers.

The first example that comes to mind is Angus Young, who has said that he considers his wireless rig to be part of his "sound". If any rock musician qualifies as "old", well, Angus ain't running around on stage like he used to. Anyway, that's just one example. Pros use wireless rigs all the time. They're not BT, though.

I am having a lot of trouble with my works laptop /docking station using usb for skype - To the point where I am going to try brining in a real sound card and use one of my Shure dynamic mics with a 1/4 inch jack

What does that mean? What would it mean if I said "Unless it has a physical failure, your car always just works"?

I've had lots of problems with wired headphones and jacks. More often it's the headphone that's the problem, but I've have several issues with the jacks themselves. They can get stuff jammed into them, but they can also just not work properly. I don't know why exactly, but I've had it happen.

It means you can have two perfectly functional wireless devices and not be able to make them communicate at all, but it won't happen with an analog wired connection.

The big pro is that it's fully portable and gives you a freedom of movement that is difficult to match. Most of the cons are associated with poor care (corrosion, stuff jammed in there) or poor quality devices (which is a "con" shared with wireless).

There are real cons as well. Wireless devices are 5x more expensive than a wired device of equivalent quality, is susceptible to a variety of forms of interference, introduces pairing problems particularly as devices age (ie. A 6-10 year capital asset like a 2014 Honda Odyessy may randomly not work with your iPhone Xs), higher latency, unpredictable latency with different endpoints, etc.

The rage issue here is that by taking away the jack, your profoundly reduce the flexibility of the device. The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

> The only meaningful benefit is to drive revenue for Apple's secret weapon -- high margin accessories. Those $30 earbuds have a cost that is probably <$3.

As I've argued in many other places in thread, removing the headphone jack will speed the adoption and price-reduction in wireless headphones. While this is not a pro for a lot of people, it is for others, including myself.

I don't agree with the argument that the only thing is to drive revenue to Apple, as there are many different brands of wireless headphones, just as there are with wired headphones. I own non-apple bluetooth headphones.

Apple doesn't need to own the whole wireless vertical, but they are adept at cross selling within the product line.