What the in-line buttons do

One button does more than one job

A single button on the cord looks like the most basic arrangement there is, and it does more than people expect. One press plays or pauses whatever is running. One press while the phone is ringing answers the call, and one press again ends it. Two quick presses usually skip forward a track, three usually skip back.

Clamor is built this way, one button on the cable next to a metal housing, and for a lot of people it is all the control they need. The reason it works is that the press count is a language the phone already understands, which is why the same taps behave the same on gear that has never met each other.

Three buttons put the volume under your thumb

The other arrangement is a small block with three buttons: volume up, volume down, and the same multifunction button in the middle doing play, pause and calls. Specta is the pair we built around this, controls on the cable for volume, track and calls, so the phone stays in your pocket while you change something.

It sounds like a small difference until you are walking in cold weather with the phone deep in a coat. Turning the volume down for a moment to hear someone, or knocking a track on, is a thumb movement instead of a whole procedure. That is the entire argument for the extra two buttons and it is worth more in practice than it reads on paper.

The microphone lives in the same block

Wherever the buttons are, that housing on the cord is also where the microphone sits, which is why it hangs at roughly chin height. It is not hidden in the earpiece and it is not near your mouth. It sits below your chin and picks up your voice from there.

Two things follow from that. First, do not clip the block under a coat lapel or let it swing against a zip, because the microphone will faithfully record the fabric. Second, every one of our cords carries one. A wired pair without a microphone is half a pair the moment somebody calls you, so we have never made one that way.

Some of it is the phone, not the cord

It is worth knowing where the boundary is. The cord sends a simple electrical signal and the device decides what that signal means. So which app answers a call, whether double-press skips a track in a particular player, and what a long hold opens are all decisions made on the phone or the laptop, not in the button.

This is usually invisible and occasionally confusing. If a press does nothing in one app and works in another, the button is fine. And a pair with no buttons at all is a legitimate choice rather than a stripped one. Zenith is our plainest pair with nothing on the cable, and for someone who starts and stops audio from the screen anyway, a cord with nothing on it is one less thing to catch on a collar.