Bluetooth Hell
This article is dedicated to Chris Walla, former guitarist and producer for teenage me’s favourite band, Death Cab for Cutie.
Wireless audio fucking sucks. Often, as I lay in bed at night I cannot sleep. I shift and squirm and cannot settle in the knowledge that we humans keep making good things worse for no reason. Maybe it’s remodelling a house that has character into 100% IKEA flat (they are doing demolition and renovations in the apartment below mine – also why I cannot sleep) or it's getting rid of the headphone jack. I hate change, it's true. But this is the worst kind of change – a change that is impractical, inconvenient, overall BAD but absolutely accepted. The moment Apple ditched that now hallowed 3.5mm jack, the status quo for a very slightly worse world was set.
Bluetooth has existed for a quarter of a decade. It is not inherently bad. One time when I was 11 I used it to receive a song on my budget Samsung budget Tocco lite at the end of the file sharing era. However - I do think Bluetooth is bad for audio. As I age, I cannot help but wonder – what percentage of my life will I have spent trying to connect to the Bluetooth speaker?
The worst part is, a BT speaker is the best you can hope for. Have you ever tried to play your Spotify on someone else’s SONOS or Alexa? And yes, you can always ask these ‘smart speakers’ to play a song. But also I don’t want to! I think it’s aesthetically horrible that I would have to announce “hey Alexa, play THE ALBUM Girl with fish by Feeble Little Horse’. And it never gets it right. In the case of the Alexa in my childhood home, it just refuses to listen to me. It feels like we have invested so much money, design, and our ever decreasing cobalt supplies to build new technologies that work worse than a headphone jack, and sound worse than a Hi-Fi system or random pair of wired headphones from the 90s.
Have we built a Bluetooth tower of babel, with hundreds of Alexas, Sonos’, Google Nests and Apple Homepods stacked so high, and too close to god, that we are doomed to never be able speak the same speaker language. Once audio friends, we will be doomed to forever remain sonically isolated, with the Airpod Pro drones marching mindlessly past the poor doomed souls squatting over a phone speaker trying to listen to 2010 Alex G.
What does it say about our technology when we can no longer pass the AUX? Instead of the easiest, fastest and most efficient way to play a banger from your friend’s phone, we must subject ourselves to a series of beeps, pairing and of course the inevitable ‘device not found’. By the time you connect, all momentum has died and that Coco & Clair Clair verse you wanted to share falls flat.
