Disagree. It beats the alternative. My 50's are getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror soon to be joined by my 60s.....and I find myself more and more happy to have made this many laps around the nearest star with a few dots left on my dice and the ability to feed myself, provide for my family, and watch more than a few sunrises........benefits from a workday that begins BEFORE that happy event. Bring on the 80s....OR the 90s!!!
So... recently bought a set of really great budget earbuds last week, Anker Soundcore A40s... They're amazing at their retail price of ~$90, but sell on Mazzy for just over $40 now. Have probably the best bass response w/o distortion in mids or highs in its retail competition -- and better than some costing $200+ w/ all marketing blather, no arse (Cambridge Audio Melomania, utter garbage sound, laughable retention in-ear, and expensive as well). Like most earbuds post-covid, they come with noise-cancelling which I never use for its lairy provenance w/ problems in child cognitive development -- means the brain hears and changes to accept it, even if your conscious mind does not. Not a fan getting of trained to hear counter-sound all the time... mostly because what if you need not to hear it? Conflict -- and thus dependence. $40 for earbuds of this quality's a steal in 2025. But got my set and found, when pass-thru's selected -- only squelchy static. Plays music and audio for media just fine, plus no chg in any other features... but got a bum pair. Annoying... and uncharacteristically for the company, they're ignoring my drop in rating (usually get a msg from Anker a few days after going live, for all my products of theirs). So a few weeks later, my second backup pair also died (bought both A40s in 2022), so ordered another set (at $40? Done). Got that yesterday... Soundcore did some updating to the earcups, which is really the only point of contention I had with the old original pair. Now they stay in even better, almost as good as the more pricey athletic versions, and far, faaar better than their P40i and Liberty Pro earcups, which are oval in cross-section vs. round. My ear canal's round, and the P40i I bought in '24 was not it -- constantly fell out no matter what size earcup. Wrong shape is wrong shape... But my FFS, involved how Soundcore designs their audio options on-board, accessible with the Soundcore app. There's a feature called HearID, which uses a hearing test to gauge how to set EQ freqs customised to you, L and R. Based on how you answer, the app uploads this data to the buds, which tunes your sound. Because I had such good exp with prior A40s, thought without doing this test, would have identical sound to the old ones -- which was mind-blowing. Huh -- sounded thin, almost like hearing AM radio. What happened? Wasn't the EQ presets... so took the HearID test. And it actually got worse. Did they send me another production line reject? Nope - w/ a bit of fiddling around... found that if you want the full potential in sound from these earbuds... you have to lie. There are 8(?) challenge rounds in the HearID test, each with 5 volume levels of a certain freq. Each round, you answer Yes or No if you hear it. On the 8th and last one, is a very low freq challenge, in my 50s I can't hear anymore. Trick is to answer Yes anyway. Why? Because despite supposedly catering this preference to your hearing ability, it takes out way more output than you'd think... and even though all of the last challenge's freqs were non-existent to me... boy did I hear the difference, when I retook the test, nasty-funky-lying to the app. That's annoying. If you offer a custom EQ setting matched to your hearing, do it properly -- in fact set 'Yes to all' as default setting, no HearID test necessary. Haven't seen any drop in battery life doing this, get 10 hrs consistently as never use noise-cancellation. Now back to my playlists -- which is a separate FFS I'll post later on (right now off to enjoy Nujabes' album 'Modal Soul', John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme', maybe some peak late '90s Stereolab, Dreamcatcher, and Red Velvet to keep it interesting. All waaaay better with deceived A40s)
