Do you like your electronics to be easy to use? Have good functionality? Not require regular referrals back to the owner’s manual?
Apparently not, because if you did, I wouldn’t be writing this article.
As a capitalist, I understand that businesses are incentivized to appeal to consumer demands. The greater variety of demands in the market, the greater variety of choices.
But the inverse of this is also true, which must be why every headphones customer other than me prefers they be sleek, solid pieces of plastic, because god forbid someone prefer to have a few unsightly buttons sticking out.
I used to have a great pair of Sony headphones. They had a power button, a button for play/pause, a button to turn the noise canceling on or off, a volume switch, and a fast forward/rewind switch. Each gave me an unmistakable “click” to know when I had pushed it. I had developed muscle memory for each one, and could easily do any of the above actions without fumbling with my phone, laptop, or whatever device to which the headphones were connected.
Then I broke part that connected one of the actual speakers to the headband while packing for a move. As I was in a rush and the headphones’ warranty had expired, I figured it was best just to toss them and buy a new pair once I had moved in to my new place. One less thing to pack, right?
Upon moving into my new place, I went to Costco. I needed my new pair right then since I used them every day for work, and I was not about to go back to my tinny $10 wired earbuds that became Gordian’s knot every time I looked away from them for more than five minutes. Even if I only had to do that for two days of Amazon Prime shipping.
When I arrived at Costco, I found the model of headphones I broke had been discontinued, but they carried Sony’s newest model. Newer is always better, right? I picked up a pair and went home. Little did I know of the vexation that awaited me.
When I opened the box of my new headphones, I was aghast to find only a power button and a noise canceling button. Upon reviewing the manual, I found the rest of the buttons had been replaced with various touch-sensitive prompts. Double-tap the side of the headphone to play or pause. Slide up/down to increase/decrease volume. Slide forward/backward to fast forward/rewind. Okay, simple enough. I could get used to this.
To be fair, all of these touch-sensitive controls worked most of the time I used them. In fact, they worked almost 100% of the time whenever I was wearing them alone. But God help my coworkers whenever they tried to talk to me while I was listening to music with those things. It usually went something like this:
Coworker: Comes up to me and starts talking
Me: Double-taps my headphones to pause my music
Music: Continues to play unabated
Coworker: Continues to talk
Me: Double-taps my headphones again, becoming irked
Music: Continues to play unabated
Coworker: Stops talking, realizing I’m not listening to a word he’s saying
Me: Double-taps my headphones a third time, visibly frustrated at this point
Music: Pauses
Coworker: Sees me scowling and frantically tapping on my headphones. Thinks I’m listening to something more important than whatever bullshit he’s bothering me with and leaves before I can say anything
Don’t get me wrong, there were several times when that little mishap worked out to my benefit. I guess the J-pop I was listening t-ahem-I mean Norwegian black metal I was listening to really was more important than whatever bullshit my coworker was bothering me with. But before you hacks at Sony try to write that off as a feature, not a bug, you know what other headphones had that same feature? Your earlier discontinued version of those same headphones without the touch-sensitive controls! In fact, they were even better since my coworkers could clearly see the unsightly physical pause button sticking out of my headphones, and if they saw me tapping the side of my headphones instead of pushing that button they took it as an unmistakable sign to fuck off. What was better, I could tap on the side of my non-touch-sensitive headphones knowing it wouldn’t accidentally trigger some other control I didn’t want to use.
(Or I’d just ignore them entirely without or without headphones. You know, like an adult.)
Which brings me to another issue with the touch-sensitive controls: although sometimes they’ll not work at all when you touch them, they’ll just as often think you told them to do something when you didn’t. Brushed your shoulder against them? I guess he wants us to skip to the next track! Was that a double-tap? Is he trying to pause the music again? No, he didn’t lift his finger all the way off before the second tap and he touched us in a slightly higher place. He must be trying to obliterate his eardrums! Volume UP! Is he trying to take us off without pausing the music, which we refuse to do anyway, so he can talk to his coworker? No, he’s holding us the wrong way to do that! He must want us to power off the noise-canceling and mute the audio without pausing it for a couple seconds!
Yes, that last one is an actual feature. If you place your entire palm on the side of one of the headphones, like one might do if they’re trying to take them off or readjust them, the noise-canceling and the audio both stop for a few seconds before returning. In case you might want to hear the outside world before realizing that was a mistake and returning to your self-imposed isolation.
Even should you want to use this feature for those of you whose coworkers only bother you in brief sound bites, you’re still going to look like you’re trying to ignore them. Hell, you’ll look even ruder than simply tapping on your headphones by instead pressing them even tighter against your ears. Not to mention pressing the headphones tighter against your ears also defeats the purpose of turning off the noise-canceling and audio.
There must be at least a sliver of a market for earbuds that use real buttons, since there’s still a decent number of them available. But if you have any other expectations of those earbuds such as:
- Be true wireless (as opposed to having a cable connect the earbuds)
- Have a hook that goes around your ear since the ones that only sit in your ears always fall out
- Easily connect to your phone and each other without a headache
- Not sound like complete ass
You’re apparently a high-maintenance diva in the audio world, since the only pair I could find that meets this long list of demands are the PowerBeats Pro. And those just inexplicably shat the bed on me for the third time since purchasing them. Considering Beats is owned by Apple, the ones I own have probably been discontinued by now and the new version also has touch-sensitive controls instead.
Without the surface area of full headphones to allow for swiping motions, I can only imagine the touch-sensitive controls on earbuds resemble some kind of morse code. Except that’s doing a disservice to morse code, since that’s a universally recognized form of communication, whereas each brand of earbuds has its own unique set of prompts, meaning what adjusts the volume for one brand will call your drug dealer from high school for another.
All the headaches this audio equipment gives me make the brain cancer they’re also probably giving me seem mild by comparison. So maybe I should actually be thanking these electronics companies, since it’s not like I’m going to stop using their headphones. What else would I do? Leave myself alone with my thoughts or have a real conversation for once?