I've reviewed headphones for over a decade: Here are 5 things I wish they did differently

Over the last decade and a half, I’ve been one of the most-read headphone writers out there; but most of my personal experiences generally stay in the lab and don’t get read by the masses. I mean, come on: nobody wants to read about how I had to fool a sensor into thinking headphones were on a real human instead of my work husband, Headdie Mercury. When I do write about behind-the-curtain stuff, it’s generally so nerdy and dry that most simply tune out.

But there are a few things so pervasive and obvious that I feel like I shouldn’t need to be the one pointing out that something’s messed up. Below are the five things that I want changed in the headphone industry right away.

1. Stop locking features behind accounts

Any time I run into a headline feature of headphones that forces me to make an account, my coworkers are treated to a loud “ÇA ME GRIT” through the lab door.

Though it’s something you may not realize is an issue, there have been many incidences of companies having… let’s say security issues in the past. Once your personal information is out there, it’s out there. I’d really rather not make yet another login to potentially get compromised just so my headphones can store my location data or health information on someone else’s server.

Sure, this seems a bit silly to complain about, but I have to believe it’s more than a little annoying to someone who’s had their email or credit cards jacked due to expired credentials before. It’s also extremely unnecessary for a lot of the things that you’d get by making an account. There’s a bunch of cheaper earbuds on the market that force you to make an account to even use the app to begin with, and that just sucks. Screw that.

2. Stop changing core features with firmware updates

I know why this particular complaint is unfair, but the state of firmware updates and their changelogs are terrible at best. When people buy headphones, they expect them to work the same way from one day to the next, or maybe a little bit better here and there. They never want their headphones to break or get crappier because they updated. But companies doing exactly that has been more common recently.

Having a way to roll back bugged, unwanted, or failed firmware installs on headphones would save a lot of headaches — but it’s challenging to implement.

To its credit, Bose has an updater tool that will allow in (in most cases) to try to re-install a botched firmware install. But so few headphone companies have such a thing at all. But you can’t really install older firmware. It should be something you can do. It should be easy enough that an average person could start the process. But it isn’t.

Having a means to roll back bugged, unwanted, or failed firmware installs on headphones would save a lot of headaches, but it’s a challenging thing to implement. There’s a reason it’s not more common! Though many firmware updates are simply boring security fixes or feature adds, not all of them are so benign. Some can remove features or even change the tuning of your headphones in ways you can’t recover easily, and most changelogs aren’t clear at all what you’re about to do to your headphones.

I just wish that consumers weren’t forced to live with a huge change to a product they owned and liked — especially if they don’t want it.

3. Design with easy maintenance in mind

The number of times I’ve bought a new headphone for its features is zero. Every single time I’ve purchased a set of cans for myself or others, it’s because a component died in a way that I couldn’t fix easily.

Though I’m the kind of guy who loves to tinker, maintain, and upgrade my existing tools — most people aren’t aren’t even going to pick up a screwdriver, let alone a soldering iron, for these fixes. When most people are faced with a break that takes effort to fix, usually the answer is to huck out the old headphones and spend a ton of money on the new. It’s appalling to me every time I hear that a loved one tossed their favorite headphones over a broken solder point or busted ear pad.

Now that headphones are skyrocketing in price and new international regulations are targeting headphones specifically, maybe it’s time we asked for more. It’s not like we’re completely in the dark about the most common failure points. Since the beginning of Bluetooth headphones, it’s been:

1. Batteries losing charge capacity.
2. Charging port failures from extended use.
3. Padding disintegrating or getting super gross.
4. Foreign object/moisture damage.

None of these problems are prohibitively difficult to solve. However, it’s expensive to do so.

In the past, there were many headphones that shared pad sizes with other models. For example, Beyerdynamic’s one-size-fits-all strategy, and a number of other companies adopted ear cup geometry that allowed their products to use aftermarket Sony MDR-V6 pads. But nowadays, it’s hard to find more “standard” sizes for things as designs get more unique.

The battery and padding issues should become less of an issue over time, but the charge port failures are definitely a difficult solve. If you have the option to charge your headphones wirelessly, that’s an enormous plus. By removing all the stress of plugging and unplugging a USB cable often, the tiny, fragile soldering inside your headphones won’t break so easily. Since making my own headphones charge without putting wear on the port, the only failure in the last 10 years I’ve suffered is the battery aging too much.

Maybe that’s something that might get standardized in the next revision of USB or something. Who knows? A boy can dream.

4. Offer better sound personalization

Though I give Apple a lot of guff, the one thing they do better than anyone else (other than Bose) is adjust its products to the user to account for fit issues and the like. By that I mean: they use the ANC system’s capabilities to adjust its products performance to ensure that from head to head to head, giving most an extremely similar experience with the same product. It’s for this precise reason why it’s so mystifying that it took so long for the company to offer an equalizer for its products — let alone such a simplistic one.

Tuning to the listener is one of the bigger hurdles to clear when it comes to really nailing headphone performance. Not only do some people have significant variations in how loudly they hear the uppermost octaves of sound, but preferences tend to vary a bit from person to person as far as bass and treble are concerned. Figuring out how to reliably account for these sources of variation should unlock better sound quality for most people. But it seems as though we’re a ways off from seeing this become a reality.

There are plenty of in-app hearing tests, sure, and these are met with mixed successes and failures. But getting a good baseline for your own preferences will enable you to make really easy adjustments to meet your tastes afterward. You really only need a couple tweaks once you’ve got headphones that sound close enough to a reasonable baseline.

Companies that have been making earbuds compete with hearing aids should have a natural advantage here, as the lessons learned while turning audiogram results into filters for general users should prove instructive. But not everyone has the time or money to go get their hearing checked, and an audiogram can only tell you so much. For consumer-oriented tuning in particular, something more involved is necessary — and consumers are allergic to effort.

Despite that, I want to see more parametric equalizers in consumer headphones, dammit.

5. Remember actual people are using these

I really, really want headphone companies to stop getting too cute with weird designs that I charitably term: “bone-headed.” This one’s a personal bugbear of mine, for two reasons:

1. It makes testing headphones on a dummy head insanely frustrating when poor design choices make a good fit impossible.
2. Features are only useful when they work. When they don’t, sometimes the product simply isn’t useful to some.

While this isn’t an issue that’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind, there are lots of little decisions here and there that can completely ruin a product for one reason or another. Decisions can make sense if you’re trying to meet a deadline for manufacturing, but it’s not hard to see why a product will fail if it has some glaring user issues like:

1. Using a one-shape-fits-all approach to earbud design when it very much doesn’t.
2. All of a headphones’ internals are loaded into one side causing fit issues.
3. High clamping force, completely forgetting that people wear glasses.
4. Finicky wear-detect systems that disable core features of a product like ANC.
5. Too heavy.
6. Catches hair in the hinges.
7. Putting the charging port in bizarre places.
8. Ear-unfriendly designs.

Making a good audio product means that you’ve made something comfortable, performant, and reliable. Though that means different things to different people, there are some universal truths that many seem to either be unaware of, or ignore completely. For example: “ears come in all shapes and sizes” means that you need to have a way to account for ear shapes that aren’t friendly to your chosen design. The Sony LinkBuds Fit did a great job with this. AirPods… not so much.

Bad design should become pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to how a certain pair of headphones might cause someone pain, or break with normal use. If something causes someone else issues, it’s generally not their fault — it’s the product’s. But sometimes genuine attempts at improvement can lead to adverse situations, and it’s important to remember not to blame users for complaining about it: ask what the hell went wrong first.