The real reason your high-end Bluetooth headphones don’t sound as good as you’d expect

You’ve done your homework; you researched a pair of high-end headphones and lined them up with an expensive Hi-Res music streaming service, but something seems off. Your tunes just don’t sound quite as good as when listening with wired headphones or a speaker. The problem, almost certainly, is that you’re listening over Bluetooth — a convenient and almost unavoidable way to listen to music on our phones.

I’ll spare you the history lesson, but the great irony is that Bluetooth was never really designed to transfer high-fidelity media between devices. The earliest Bluetooth audio specifications were designed for heavily compressed, mono-band speed, a far cry from the studio-quality masters that you can get your ears on today.