Bluetooth headphones have brought me joy for years—sometimes a little too much. Once, while waiting for a flight at my regional airport, I switched on the active noise cancellation, closed my eyes, and got so sucked in by Elvis Costello’s album Imperial Bedroom that I didn’t hear the boarding calls. It was no fun texting my client that I’d missed my flight. I fibbed that I’d been stuck in traffic, because blaming Costello for delivering such an immersive triumph would’ve been uncouth.
Kind of blue
For all their convenience, Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have fundamental problems. Take their batteries (please). They’re only fully rechargeable 300–500 times, which means that after just two or three years of moderate-to-heavy use, most people toss their depleted wireless ear-fi in a drawer and buy a new pair.
The regular, non-Bluetooth ’phones I find the most captivating are open-backed planar magnetics like my Audeze LCD-4 and HiFi-MAN HE1000se. That means I’m out of luck when I travel, because those cans are big and dorky-looking, and the planar Bluetooth products I’m aware of are all closed-backed. That’s understandable—indeed essential—due to the need to block out high levels of background noise, and because in public, your music shouldn’t bother others.
More problematic is that the Bluetooth codec is only capable of playing lossy, worse-than–CD-quality files.1 Not even Bluetooth 5.3, the latest version, supports lossless audio on its own, although chip maker Qualcomm has a Snapdragon microprocessor that allows the playback of hi-rez files within the Bluetooth standard.2
Among the first to take advantage of this option was Edifier, the Chinese mid-fi brand, which offers an honest-to-goodness Bluetooth planar headset, the $400 Stax Spirit S3. (Edifier bought Stax in 2012.) The company says that the S3 supports hi-rez music up to 24/96. That ticks an important box for me. But
