The eternal debate
The internet is full of audiophiles who swear by the superiority of wired. Then there are those who cut the cord in 2016 and never looked back. Both camps are partly right – and partly wrong.
The answer depends on what you do with your headphones. Not what some Reddit user does with theirs.
Everyday life speaks in favour of wireless
Most people listen to music on their phone. On the bus, at the office, on a run, at the shops. In all these situations, a cable is just in the way. It snags on door handles, yanks the headphones off your head, and ties itself into a mysterious knot in your pocket that requires the patience and fine motor skills of a bomb disposal technician.
Modern Bluetooth (5.0 and newer) is good enough. The sound quality is more than sufficient for streaming on Spotify and Apple Music. The latency is so small you won't notice it during calls or videos. Gaming can be a different story – but there are solutions for that too.
All of our headphones – the VMK series over-ears and the NL series earbuds – are wireless. This is not a coincidence. It's a deliberate choice, because 95 percent of our customers use them in everyday life, not in a studio.
When the cable wins
In the interest of honesty: a wired connection is technically superior. An uncompressed signal travels through the cable, so in theory the sound quality is better. There's zero latency.
If you:
- mix music in a studio
- play competitive games where milliseconds matter
- listen to FLAC files through a €3,000 DAC
...then wired is the better choice. But you know what? In that case, you're probably not buying consumer headphones – you're buying studio gear.
By the way, the VMK series headphones have an AUX input. So you can use them with a cable too, if the battery dies or you want to test the difference. Spoiler: most people can't hear it.
But what about the sound quality, really?
Here's the thing. Bluetooth codecs (aptX, AAC, LDAC) have improved massively. The gap to wired has narrowed so much that you can only reliably hear it in controlled blind tests, in a silent room, with expensive equipment.
On the bus, the difference between Bluetooth and a cable is zero. Zero. Tyre hum, engine noise, and the phone conversation of the bloke sitting next to you drown out everything. That's why ANC is a far more significant factor than whether the signal travels through a wire or through the air.
Jasse – our sound engineer, whose ears are literally insured – tunes every model so that the Bluetooth audio is the best it can possibly be. He doesn't compromise. Henri's Alfa Romeo compromises (mainly on reliability), but Jasse doesn't.
Summary
Wireless is the better choice if you use headphones in normal everyday life. Wired is better if you do professional audio work or you're that guy at parties who lectures everyone about the superiority of vinyl.
We make headphones for that 95 percent. And that money goes towards building the Death Star, so thanks in advance.
