On Buying in this Digital Age
Buying anything online is always a gamble. I remember a time when things felt different, when they were built to last. New electronics had a certain weight in your hands, a solidity that promised years of use. Now, it feels like we're just paying for the ghost of quality, a vague promise in a plastic shell. The idea of things being built to last isn’t slowly dying… It’s dead.
You take the time to read the reviews, and eventually you have to make a choice. Sometimes you get lucky and win; others turn out to be a complete bust. As this was my first time buying from this particular anonymous brand, it's hard to say whether my pair was just defective, but based on their performance, I won’t be buying from them again.
Out of the box, I put the headphones on the charger and left them for a few hours. When I came back to them, I tested them wired first. I turned them on, plugged them in, and there was sound... but that's it. The product description says the noise cancellation is supposed to work while wired as long as they're on. But as I pressed the noise cancellation button a handful of times, there was no response—not even a noise to acknowledge I had pressed the button.
So, I tried the Bluetooth... and that’s where things got interesting.
I'd like to assume the pair I received is defective, but who knows? They immediately turned the volume down on my tablet, as if I were holding the button. Pressing the volume-up button did nothing. Mashing it a few times finally got a bit of response, and if I did it enough to counteract the volume-down issue, it would constantly beep at me, warning me that the volume was maxed. If I pressed the volume-up button again, it stopped, and the volume immediately went back to zero. As far as noise canceling? Nothing.
And this is the part that truly reveals the game. The box proudly boasts that the sound was "tuned by a Grammy-award winning engineer." (Something I hadn’t noticed until I received the product.) They don't name him, of course. It's such a lazy lie. A perfect metaphor for the product itself, actually. They’re a vague promise of quality with no actual substance to back it up. They expect us to accept the claim without question, just as they expect us to accept the shoddy product.
I could return them, but I live out in the middle of nowhere. The whole point of ordering online is convenience, and it becomes super inconvenient to have to box them up, go into town, and ship them back. And that’s the final insult. The system is designed so that sending back their garbage is more hassle than just eating the loss. So, I'm eating this $80 loss.
The whole experience has already left a sour taste in my mouth. As I said in the beginning, buying anything online is a gamble. This time was a complete bust for me. We've been conditioned to accept this cycle of disappointment. We're not just losing money on broken products; we're losing our right to expect things to simply work.
