Wireless Headphones

Wireless Headphones are excellent for smartphone, tablet, game console, and laptop users who want the ability to listen free from the shackles of inconvenient wires. The freedom they afford users can be a gamechanger around the home or office, and dramatically improve particular activities like exercise, running or watching TV.

Wireless headphones provide freedom to exist without being tied down by cables, and can be in-ear, over-the-ear or on-ear types. Wireless technologies are getting better sounding all the time, but sometimes you may pay a bit more for wireless headphones compared to their wired counterpart.

TWO MOST POPULAR WIRELESS HEADPHONE AUDIO TRANSMISSION METHODS
  • Bluetooth is probably the most common wireless transmission for smartphones and tablets. Bluetooth audio quality is steadily improving and essentially noise-free thanks to digital-based signal transmission. However its has limitations that customers should be aware of:

    • Consistency of implementation: Not all Bluetooth implementations are created equal, and not all implementations will work the same between different paired devices. For example, Apple's devices tend to pair beautifully and painlessly with their own phones or computers, but can be a little finicky when trying to pair to a Windows laptop.

    • Consistency of connection: Anyone who has used Bluetooth before will know that sometimes the connection strength, even when proximity isn't an issue, can be quite poor. Momentary drop outs, digital warbles, and full-blown disconnections are not uncommon with these devices.

    • Bandwidth limitations: Most wireless implementations these days have solved this issue, but older or lesser Bluetooth headphones (especially those that also use a microphone) can sometimes place limits on the frequency bandwidth of your music depending on the quality of the connection.

    • Range: Bluetooth is generally not known for having strong connection integrity even at close range, but as one drifts farther than 10 feet, the connection gets more and more fragile.
    • Latency: Bluetooth isn't known for being a low-latency connection paradigm in itself. Though there are implementations that aim to amend this shortcoming, ideally one wouldn't choose to use Bluetooth if latency was incredibly important.
  • WiFi (generally 2.4GHz) is part of a newer paradigm that's come around recently, and is very popular with gamers for their superior performance in basically all signal/connectivity metrics when compared to Bluetooth. The main inconvenience with this paradigm is that they generally aren't natively- implemented into most media devices like computers, phones, or gaming consoles, such that they almost always require an external dongle to make it work. 

    This means that they're not exactly suitable for an "on the go" use case, and can be a little more complex to set up vs. Bluetooth, but for listening at home they have numerous benefits.

    • Connections are generally more consistent regardless of your media device, because the dongle is usually made specifically to work with the headphone.

    • Connections are generally more resistant to dropouts, spurious noises, or full-blown disconnections.

    • Overall bandwidth can be much higher, so the music rarely (if ever) suffers from a quality standpoint

    • Range and latency are also generally able to be much better due to not being limited by Bluetooth's inherent capacity threshold.

While they might be more expensive than comparable wired headphones, we at Headphones.com fully believe that the benefits to convenience can make that difference totally worth it, especially because wireless headphones have gotten to sound pretty excellent in recent years.

We really enjoy the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless as an option for on-the-go listening if you need a Bluetooth over-ear headphone, and the Audeze Maxwell is one of the best tuned headphones on the market period if you want something for home-listening of any sort—though their feature set is tailored for gamers, the included noise-rejecting microphone also makes it an excellent office headphone.