Category Articles

Commuting, running, the gym, sleep, calls and gaming each rule out different earbuds. How to narrow a large audio catalog by use case rather than by spec.

Most audio listings publish no warranty at all. What durations actually appear, what every warranty excludes, and what a lifetime claim usually resolves to.

Ear tips, cables, dongles and the charger that is not included. How to read the included components field on an earbud listing, and what its silences mean.

A 5.0 average from two ratings is not evidence. How to read star ratings and review counts on white-label earbuds sold under interchangeable brand names.

Two pairs of earbuds can share a name and differ in hardware. How to read Apple part numbers, Samsung region codes and Anker internal model numbers.

Renewed, refurbished and open box audio differ in warranty, battery condition and review pool. What changes on the hardware and what to check before buying.

IPX4 is splash, IPX7 is immersion, and waterproof means nothing on its own. How to read water resistance claims on earbud listings, including invalid codes.

One pair of earbuds has three battery numbers. How to find the runtime you actually live with, and why 120 hour claims describe the charging case.

Hi-Res, HiFi, studio quality and deep bass are not specifications. What each claim needs attached to it before it tells you anything about a pair of earbuds.

Earbud spec tables are seller entered and often wrong. How to read scientific notation, impossible battery figures and placeholder tokens on audio listings.

Almost every Bluetooth pairing problem is one of about eight failures, and most of them produce symptoms that point somewhere other than the cause. Working through them in order resolves the great majority of cases without a replacement product, and…

Range is the specification most likely to be quoted and least likely to describe anything a listener will experience. Of the 384 products catalogued on this site, 111 state a range of 10 meters and 45 state 15 meters. Both…

Transparency mode goes by several names. Ambient sound, awareness mode, hear-through, passthrough and ambient aware all describe the same arrangement: the external microphones already fitted for noise cancellation are used in reverse, feeding the outside world into the driver so…

Active noise cancellation is the feature most likely to be described in absolute terms and least able to deliver them. It is a real and well understood piece of signal processing with a precise domain of effectiveness, and outside that…

Driver diameter is the specification most often used as a proxy for sound quality, and it is one of the weakest predictors on a headphone specification sheet. A larger diameter tells you something real about the transducer, but what it…

Hi-Res Audio is one of the few audio terms with an actual definition behind it, which makes its use on wireless products unusually easy to check. The Japan Audio Society administers a certification and a logo, and the requirement for…

A viewer watching a film through wireless headphones usually sees lips and hears speech in step. The same headphones used for a fast game, a video call or a musical instrument can feel unusable. That inconsistency is not a defect…

Multipoint is the feature that lets one pair of headphones hold an active Bluetooth connection to two host devices at the same time, so a call arriving on a phone can take over from music playing on a laptop without…

Bluetooth version numbers appear on more headphone listings than any other technical specification. Across the 384 products catalogued on this site, 159 name Bluetooth 5.3, 66 name 5.4, 23 name 5.0, 16 name 5.2 and 4 name 5.1. The number…

Two pairs of wireless earbuds can carry the same Bluetooth version, the same driver diameter and the same advertised battery figure, and still hand the listener a measurably different stream. The variable that separates them is the codec: the compression…