I’ve always found the idea of putting decent drivers on the other side of the BT compression algorithm to be sort of insane.
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Quality is very subjective, but I believe A2DP is basically a hack to get audio over bluetooth and is not considered very good. APT-X is the newer and better codec.
I had a bluetooth headset I bought that used A2DP and went back to my wired headphones the very next day, sold them to a friend and he’s very happy with them. YMMV
Mcintosh has a headphone amplifier
On high output, It’s one watt. On normal, it’s 250 mW. Watts (plural) in a headphone amplifier can be very dangerous. Which is not to say that every headphone jack can drive headphones to my (or your) satisfaction, its just that a small amount of power into most headphones will make your eardrums bleed. For speakers, it’s another story.
Have you considered writing a sci fi book ?
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To be fair, the cartoon being referenced was talking about speakers, not headphones. 
110 db/2.83 V/1m
Sadly, this is only for the high frequency drivers-- the woofer is only 88 dB/W
Of course, any money you “save” by buying a 5 W amplifier will be eaten up by the price of the speakers.
(and single driver, horn loaded speakers can be very efficient, and possibly suitable for hobbyist builds)
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I figured it out. I’m horrifically sleep deprived most of the time, because of apnea. Just started on CPAP. Closest I can remember to feeling like this is peaking on Adderall back in the day. Having a good night’s sleep for the first time in a decade and not spending the whole time choking on my soft palate is practically as good as drugs.
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Chuckle.
No it’s the Magico Ultimate 3.
this is more in the DIY vein. It’s called a Kleinhorn.
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Kleinhorn, like klein bottle? It seems… wrong… to punch holes in the flare of your horn just to compact it’s length… Didn’t we get it right with the tuba? Can’t the horn be “wound around itself” so you don’t have to worry about self-intersections?
Also, that photo’s not giving me scale. I keep switching between the powered speakers being around chest height, and the whole thing being a tiny balsa wood model.
FWIW, I really like the MEE AF32 headphones. They have held up pretty well to some serious abuse, although I do have some electrical tape holding them together after an unfortunate incident when my grandson was playing with them;-) The sound quality may not be as good as my grado’s but they sound very nice. Of almost equal importance to me is that people don’t complain when I am talking the phone with them. They are a great headset for my phone and provide good music as well and can be had for right around $50. One of the linked review pages didn’t make the cut for the best but what did make it was 3X the cost as well.
I have no idea how they sound, or how difficult they are to build.
my larger point though, is that “wattage”, however precisely defined, is a terrible way to rate speakers–even powered speakers, since there are inefficient speakers that demand larger amplifiers, and efficient speakers that can reproduce symphonic music from the smallest of amplifiers.
Totally agree.
Although, couldn’t you measure sound volume in watts? Like, it takes a known amount of energy to change the airpressure to an extent to create the sound in the first place right? It’d be rather indirect I suppose, but there should definitely be a way to state the amount of energy in watts that is required to stretch and compress the air a given amount and in so doing use wattage as a measurement of sound itself.
Each Kleinhorn is 10 feet tall, and five feet wide.
I’m not picky about flashing lights or anything but these suit me for the “small, portable, and cheap” criteria. Even though cans are never really that small…
Most of the latency is from the cellphone, or from Wifi if you’re using VOIP over that, but what I’d really like would be a set of headphones/earbuds/whatever that have microphones on each one, so I could use a smartphone to build a hearing-aid app for near-free, and that’s something that latency really does matter for (especially keeping both ears in sync.) My hearing was never great, especially with noise in the background, and I’m starting to get some age-related high-frequency loss, and even a cheap smartphone has far more CPU horsepower than you’d need to use digital signal processing to kick up the volume on the high frequencies more than the lows.
I’ve always wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to have a headset that utilizes multiple Bluetooth channels/pairings, lets say 4, to quadruple the bandwidth bottleneck, even 2 one for each ear would be double the bandwidth. I realize that this would have to be accommodated on both the device and the source, but wifi did something similar with multichannel devices.
I was inspired by this thread to research some more bluetooth options, especially in the “dongle” category that lets you use your own headphones. I found that Sony had a range of options with their SBH line; the SBH20 is a basic bluetooth dongle that has minimal controls and a small 1.3" x 1.3" size for about $30. The SBH50 is longer but thinner - about 1"x 2.3" inches long, but with that it includes a display and FM radio built in, which makes it similar to the older Sony Ericsson MW600 that I’ve used and liked a lot. Cost is about $50. The top-of-the-line (at 3.5" long) SBH52 at about $75 includes all the features of the SBH50 plus it adds a speaker, which means it can be used as a tiny handset or speakerphone, which strikes me both as ridiculous and particularly useful for phablet users.
I bought the SBH52 on a whim (with minimal research), and have only played with it for a day, but so far it seems like it’s pretty good, though I’m not sure I really need the speaker. It could be useful while driving, I guess. I was kinda hoping that it could connect to my iPhone and activate Siri, essentially allowing me to wear it on my lapel and ask questions and get answers over the speaker without accessing my phone - similar to the HAL9000 replica from ThinkGeek. Sadly the “phone” button on the SBH52 doesn’t trigger that function on either iOS or android devices, so it doesn’t work that way. Maybe a firmware update will change that in the future though.
Here’s a picture of the SBH50 vs 52 (via techz.vn);
EDIT: One more option, the new(ish) MW1 from Sony is the size of the SBH50, but includes a micro-SD slot capable of up to 32 gigs of MP3 storage.
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