The Unpredictability of Wireless Headphones

95% of the Time Wireless Works…But the 5% Can’t Be Helped

I love my wireless headphones. Convenient. Playback features. Easy to slip into pockets.

And for what they wireless headphones are, they work exactly how you want.

Until…

They don’t.

I’ve been using the JBL (teal) wireless headphones for work for about half a year, mostly for Zoom calls. They have this nifty “feature”, where the mics on the earbuds can let you hear your own voice when talking, called “VoiceAware”. I think it’s useful in some situations, but working remotely, alone in my room, I’d rather have passive or active noise canceling.

The first few months, VoiceAware was not enabled on my Zoom calls, which was as expected.

One day, it was inexplicably enabled if I was using the headphone mic and any sound on Zoom was drowned out by the exaggerated sound of my air purifier.

I apparently couldn’t disable the feature on the headphone itself (a feature I love in my Jabra). Instead, you have to connect the headphone to a phone, download the app, and disable it there.

My wireless headphones are back to working how I expected them too.

I was rudely reminded that when you put advanced software into your hardware, it sometimes works in unexpected ways.

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