Bluetooth receiver with a sane low-battery warning?
The behavior of a bluetooth device when it reaches low battery is never advertised, and a lot of the time no one even mentions it in the reviews. My experience is that most devices give you an audio warning on repeat until you charge it, which is obviously bad design.
Can anyone recommend a bluetooth receiver that doesn't do this? I've heard that apple airpods only warn you once or twice, but my preference is for a battery-powered bluetooth receiver that lets me plug in wired headphones. I'm still interested in hearing about other bluetooth headphones though.
If there's nothing on the market, it might be interesting to try and build something. There must be bluetooth modules you can buy, but I wonder if they would have the same problem. Maybe you can modify the firmware? If anyone out there is hardware-hacking bluetooth devices, let me know.
Airpods Pro indeed have an unobtrusive "charge me" chime. As do Pixel Buds Pro. Both have a notification at about 15% remaining and maybe another at 5%. My Anker SoundCore headphones also (I believe) act in the same way but I have maybe only been that low once so I can't say with certainty.
Unfortunately it seems like the dividing factor is "how much money a company has and wants to spend on user experience." Most my negative experiences in this realm have been with the "affordable" levels of tech.
I’m fond of this device, but purchasing might be an issue because its appears sold out. eBay seems to have some though.
https://earstudio.store/collections/products/products/es100
I like that I can limit the charge to a max of 80% (This in theory extends the battery life). The product has a lot of other features worth checking out. I don’t recall what low battery indicators it has though…
I use JBL bluetooth headphones and the warning is pretty mild. It's a short sound effect (no talking or anything). Happens when there's about half an hour, maybe an hour or so left. Then about 20min later, I get a second warning, about 20min later a third warning and at that point I really need to charge them or they will die.
From all hearphones I've used, this is the least obtrusive one. My previous ones (Sony) had a voice saying "Low battery, please recharge headset", which took like 2 seconds and was very obtrusive compared to just a really short sound effect that I know what it means.
IMO your best solution is to change your behavior. Just create a habit to set the headphones charging when you go to bed, then pick them up fully charged in the morning. Most headsets have 6-8+ hours battery nowadays, so unless you literally listen to stuff all day, you will likely never hear a warning.
I use a Fiio BTR5, which seems pretty close to what you want. There's a noise that plays once when the battery is low (I think at like 15%? not really sure...) with no other alerts until the battery dies. IIRC the volume of the alerts is kinda loud if it's connected with the SBC codec, but I use LDAC or APT-X pretty much exclusively and it's fine on those.
The amp in it is surprisingly nice too and it can drive beefier headphones than you might expect.
I tried the much cheaper FiiO BTR11 ($20 on amazon) and it got to 10% battery with no warnings, but then it hit me with a "Please charging" every few seconds for another 18 minutes before it died.
That drives me crazy! I went through a series of cheap bluetooth earbuds a few years ago and that was one of my top annoyances alongside charging headaches and issues with alternating mono operation. I spent a while looking for any sort of review site or even reddit thread where people compared headphones by such concerns instead of audiophile metrics to little avail.
I don't have experience with receivers but on the headphone side the only solution I found was paying more for a brand name. The cheap generic ones don't have enough TLC to address bad low-battery UX. I use a pair of soundcore earbuds now which gives a mobile alert as well as a couple auditory alerts spaced out. That's much better than the cheap ones where it'd either be constant like you mentioned or super freaking loud regardless of the volume you're listening to. I do wish it'd let you configure the notification, maybe just set it to the mobile notification and fully turn off the audio notification, but I doubt that exists.
haha I have an MPOW one that has a loud two-tone beep that starts at 10%
The anker soundsync receiver doesn’t have a low battery warning other than a red light. The issue is that the battery is only tiny so won’t last long without a recharge!
Confirmed! I ordered the anker soundsync a3352, and ran the battery all the way down without hearing any low-battery warnings. Battery life felt a little short, like you said. No audio problems like I mentioned in another comment.
I forgot to mention another totally unadvertised feature on every bluetooth device. I don't know what they call it, but during silences, the audio will cut out, presumably to save battery. On the bluetooth receiver I currently own, you can hear every time the audio mutes and comes back on. There's a slight hiss while audio is playing, and a slight pop when it cuts in and out. It's only noticeable during podcasts or audio books, when people stop talking for a second.
You can find other posts online where people complain about the beginning of sentences getting clipped by this feature, which is even worse. A better implementation would only cut audio after a prolonged silence, like 30 seconds or a minute, to save battery when you accidentally leave the device on.