Earbuds update

A lot of people have been worried about my headphones situation so I thought I’d give a quick update here.

If you’re joining for the first time: I was breaking a pair of earbuds about once per week. I wear them for walking around, weightlifting and running. Because I was going through them so often, I was mostly using cheapo $20 earphones I bought at drug stores.

I bought a pair of more expensive noise-cancelling Head Rush Earbuds, about $60, from La Source. La Source offered me a no-questions-asked extended warranty for these headphones: as long as I had the receipt I could exchange a broken pair for the same model as often as I wanted.

I bought them in mid-August 2016 and in the following eight weeks I replaced them 6 times. To their credit, the staff at La Source never gave me a hard time about it. But doing the math by the end of the 1-year period I’d be getting about $2160 worth of headphones for my original $60 outlay plus $16 for the extended warranty.

That’s where I left things last time. Most recently, in mid-October I went into La Source to get a new free pair, and decided to change things up a bit. Instead of getting the same model, I applied the credit to a pair of wireless earbuds from the same manufacturer. I had to pay about $50 difference plus another $15 for the extended warranty.

The difference has been like night and day. I have not got a new set of earbuds since mid-October, so about 10-12 weeks. My guess is that a lot of the damage to my previous pairs of earbuds had been due to stress on the connector that linked up to my phone. Without this connector, there’s less of a point of failure.

A confounding factor has been that I’ve also been trying to carry them in a case rather than just wrapping them around themselves and jamming them in a pocket. I think this is also being a lot kinder to the wires.

The biggest downside is that I have to remember to charge my headphones and my phone, which is one more thing to worry about. I usually get 2 days of use out of a full charge on the earbuds, so I can skip a night without worrying too much.  It’s a mixed blessing; skipping nights keeps me from having the discipline to plug in every night.
So that’s where I am at. I’ll keep you posted as further news develops.