A pair for school and the desk

The supply list says wired for good reasons

Every autumn a lot of people arrive here holding a school list that specifies wired earbuds, and it is not schools being behind the times. A cord has nothing to pair, so thirty of them in one room do not connect to each other or to the wrong tablet. There is nothing to charge, so a device that sat in a locker all weekend still works on Monday morning.

A cord is also visible. A teacher can see at a glance whether a pair is plugged in and what it is plugged into, which is most of the reason the requirement exists at all. And a small hard case with no battery in it survives a bag in a way that other things do not.

Check the port on the school device, not the phone

This is where the buying goes wrong most often. The pair is for a school laptop or a tablet, and people check the plug against their own phone out of habit. School machines are frequently older than personal ones and frequently still have the round jack, so the pair that will not fit your phone may be exactly the right pair for the classroom.

If you can, look at the actual device before ordering. If you cannot, the round jack is the safer guess on shared school hardware, and it also fits the laptops and game controllers most households already have.

A desk pair and a pocket pair are different animals

A pair that lives at a desk is worn for hours rather than minutes, so comfort over a long stretch matters more than anything about carrying it. Nova is the one we built for that, a general purpose pair for a desk, a laptop and a working day. If most of that day is talking rather than listening, Omnitone is the pair we shaped for calls, with a soft earpiece that stays put through a long one and a fit that keeps the room out of the microphone.

A pocket pair has the opposite problem. It gets wound, unwound, stuffed into a coat and pulled out again, and what matters is that it survives that and is not a disaster to lose. Ferox is built around a thin wire you stop noticing after the first hour, and it is the one people keep a spare of.

Buying two on purpose

A fair number of people here order the same pair twice, and it is a deliberate strategy rather than an accident. One stays plugged into the work laptop and never moves. The other lives in the bag. Nothing has to be remembered, unplugged or hunted for at eight in the morning, and if one goes missing the day carries on.

It is a strategy that only makes sense with a cheap pair, which is the honest argument for the plain end of what we make. Zenith is our plainest and the cheapest way in, a smooth rounded housing with nothing on the cable and nothing to learn. Losing one in a seat cushion should be an annoyance that lasts a minute, not an afternoon.