Rumble with the dongle, an ear story
Hard Times, a tartly satirical website on music and millennial culture, did a 'story' last year about a punk audiophile, Terry Spinoza, who splurged $2,000 (about ₹1.65 lakh) on a high-end turntable to listen to the authentically muddy sound of 'his collection of poorly produced and recorded LPs'. Both 'Spinoza' and the 'Audio Perfektion' turntable that he purportedly bought are pure fiction, created only as a jibe at wannabe audiophiles and their endless quest to reach sonic nirvana by way of acquiring new (and expensive) gadgets.
You must have met a Spinoza or two.
They are easily recognisable by the angle of their noses and gushings about first pressings. Mercifully, their numbers are small and, I'd like to think, dwindling. For most people who love music, much of the listening happens on smartphones with headphones on streaming platforms such as Gaana (owned by the group that owns this publication), JioSaavn, Spotify, and Apple Music.
With phones nowadays becoming thinner and sleeker, most of them, frustratingly, don't have conventional jacks to plug in your headphones. Increasingly, people use wireless headphones that rely on Bluetooth technology to connect to phones. That is a problem.
You don't have to be a Spinoza to realise that wireless headphones can sound worse than wired ones.
Bluetooth uses 'codecs', a process that compresses and decompresses audio files to transmit them wirelessly. Most codecs make the sound lose quality. Wired headphones don't use codecs and so they sound less 'lossy'.
What do you do though if, like mine, your phone doesn't have a jack to plug in your favourite wired headphones.
