Wireless technologies *

Hello, friends

I decided to start this year with an article in the field of HIFI sound / audiophilia and this article is about sharing the results of my wireless earbud tests, which I’ve been conducting for several years since the emergence of TWS on the market. 
Sound testing is my hobby, which can be useful for others, because in everyone’s life are important bright pleasant emotions, relaxation and mental comfort, which is not always enough in the flow of turbulent events of life. And music is just the thing to bring it all in, if only for moments, or even hours, and choosing the right headphones is crucial to getting the right effect.

Testing sound is a hobby with benefits that extend beyond personal enjoyment, as its results can be valuable to others. After all, life is made brighter and more fulfilling by positive emotions, moments of relaxation, and peace of mind — things that often feel scarce in the whirlwind of modern life. Music is one of those rare things that can bring these experiences into our lives, even if just for a moment or hours at a time. Choosing the right headphones is essential to achieving that effect.

By the end of 2024, I completed testing the best wireless in-ear headphones (commonly referred to as “earbuds”) available on the market — or at least those I could find. “Best” here doesn’t necessarily mean the most expensive. It refers to the top performers in terms of sound quality. We’ve all encountered situations where lower-priced items turned out to be just as good, if not better, than their costly counterparts. That’s why my sound-quality ranking includes headphones from various price categories — from ultra-premium TWS models to more budget-friendly options.

In this post I'll share my experience in adjustment of WiFi physical channel. The channel was implemented on a software defined radio (SDR) platform. WiFi looks like a very complicated thing standardized over hundreds of pages. Could a non-expert with a PC and a couple of 100$ devices (HackRFs) somehow improve it? Here I try to develop a WiFi optimization approach basically agnostic of protocol implementation details. There's some math and Python programming in it.

TL;DR: All AI-based noise cancellations suck, only the physical cancellation technique works! And physical cancellation is implemented well only in Jabra devices yet, but other features suck them! All Bluetooth headsets suck too! So, no solution yet, just complaints!

The environment: I work in a pretty talky office room, where sit around 10 people, and all of them have many online conferences every day, including me. So, silence in the room is a rare situation.

The problem: The main problem is that most of the microphones pick up all side talk pretty loud, which makes it very unpleasant for other people to listen to my voice in meetings!

• SBC codec is OK
• Headphones have their own per-codec equalizer and post processing configuration
• aptX is not as good as the advertisements say
• LDAC is a marketing fluff
• Voice audio quality is still low
• Browsers are able to execute audio encoders compiled to WebAssembly from C using emscripten, and they won't even lag.