Since the launch of Apple’s AirPods, the personal audio space has been dominated by true wireless earbuds. Almost all earbud innovation has been driven by, and revolves around these products, with the humble wired earbud becoming the budget option: cheaper, less advanced, and lower fidelity.

So, for the last few months, when we’ve told people what we’re working on, they’d always ask: “Back to wired earbuds? Why?”

Our chief engineer David “DL” Leung was one of the pioneers of true wireless earbuds.Our SANWEAR models up to this point have been focused on pushing true wireless technology to its limits. This includes building a custom low latency 2.4GHz protocol (SANSYNC) directly into the charging module of our SANWEAR-GT. All that considered, the decision to wire back in might seem peculiar. But we had a hunch.

At the end of January, our inboxes were flooded with this CNN article by Jack Bantock titled: Why wired headphones are swinging back into style, featuring A-listers like Steph Curry, Dua Lipa, Drake, and Emma Watson “going retro” with wired earbuds. While we weren’t surprised, we were happy to have somewhere to point people. As the article highlights, wireless earbuds, for all their conveniences, have their own issues. They’re easier to lose, harder to manage when using across multiple devices, and require you to keep track of charge. Not to mention the substantial price difference.

But beyond the benefits of simplicity, there are the intangibles that wired offers: the effortless, nostalgic feeling of listening through a physical bridge between you and your media. This can be seen prominently on the Wired It Girls Instagram, a page dedicated to the wired earbud as a cultural signifier, celebrating the era of iPod Nanos, sequined tops, and dumb phones.

The wired earbud is romantic. It’s a reminder of a world before technology became an oppressive and ever-encroaching force in our lives. Still, it also can’t be denied that most wired earbuds just sound bad. After all, we want our music, our movies, and our games to sound good. 

And for gamers, wired audio has an additional benefit: Absolute Zero latency. We pushed ultra-low latency wireless as far as it could go with SANWEAR-GT, but in testing with some of the best gamers in the world, we found that there were situations where it simply wasn’t enough. Even though SANSYNC is almost 10x faster than some Bluetooth protocols, 20ms can still be the difference between defeat and victory at the competitive level.

So, what are we bringing to the table with SANWEAR-HARDWIRE?

We wanted all the elegance of the wired earbud with none of the audio compromise. The average wired earbuds on the market are built with cheap materials and performance to match. Tangly, plastic cords that begin to break within weeks; tinny, hollow sound with overinflated bass to cover up the imperfections of poorly built hardware; and grainy mics that drown out your voice with crackle and background noise.

On the other side of the spectrum are high-end studio/reference-grade in-ear monitors (IEMs), which have picked up some steam in the gaming world recently. But, as any audiophile knows, the world of IEMs can get complicated fast. If you want a wired earbud that sounds good, you often need to do hours of research and spend hundreds of extra dollars on external equipment. 

Lessons Learned

For HARDWIRE, we combined lessons from the audio community with our experience building true wireless systems, and built our new wired earbuds from the ground up to be the most seamless high-performance audio device on the market. You can read more about the technology built into HARDWIRE here. 

Furthermore, as IEM reviewers have been increasingly pointing out, the requirements for enjoyable music listening sessions and gaming can be vastly different. For competition, the immediate detection and accurate echolocation of sound cues take precedence. And oftentimes, you are forced to choose between an IEM optimized for listening, or one optimized for gaming; rarely are you given options that can do both well.

With HARDWIRE, we were able to push our signature spatial tuning even further with the built-in high-power amplifier resulting in a greater sense of space, scale, and directionality. With the digital signal processor built into the Audio Cortex, you can switch between music, combat and open-world sound profiles immediately in the Soundscape app.

The result is something we hope is effortlessly amazing: A wired earbud that looks good, and sounds even better.  A device that delivers a more tangible, grounded, and simple experience. 

This is wired, re-wired. We hope you love what we’ve made as much as we do. 

Over two decades of audio engineering have led to SANWEAR-HARDWIRE.

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