**Huge difference TWS headphones
Since 2016, Apple removed the headphone jack, AirPods wireless earbuds have quietly become Apple's super product line, such a revolutionary experience, not only created a new category of TWS earphones, but also ignited the market's broad imagination of future smart hardware.
With the launch of Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Realtek and other main control chip solutions covering low-end fields, coupled with the gradual improvement of the industrial chain of Huaqiangbei white label TWS earphone market, the cost of TWS headset has dropped rapidly.
Nowadays, the TWS headset within 50 yuan on the major e-commerce platforms is mainly composed of QCY, Xia Xin, Zheng Cavalry and other brands, and its price is concentrated in the range of 30 50 yuan, and a few models of products can be as low as 199 yuan, 299 yuan, in addition to the brand premium, what is the reason for such a big ** difference in TWS headphones? Is it possible to buy low-priced brand headphones with confidence?
TWS earphones that are actively involuted
Excluding the impact of brand premium to see the cost of TWS earphones, we must first understand the core technology and core components of TWS earphones.
TWS earphones are generally divided into two parts: charging case and wireless earphones. The charging case is responsible for the battery life of the earbuds, and the charging case part includes a wireless charging coil, power management, various analog chips, a larger battery, and a PCB motherboard. In addition to the above chips, the wireless headset part also includes: microphones, audio chips, antennas, more soft boards, flash storage, etc.
Among them, the smart Bluetooth audio chip is the core component with the highest technical content and the highest cost of TWS headphones. The intelligent audio SoC chip system design is difficult, the circuit structure is complex, covering audio, power supply, radio frequency, baseband and other units, the level of Bluetooth technology and audio codec technology determines the signal transmission effect and sound quality of TWS earphones, so the main control chip is the key to the performance of TWS earphones.
In terms of cost proportion, the main control chip accounts for 35% of the cost of the main unit of TWS earphones, and for TWS earphones as a whole, the main control chip accounts for 8% of the total cost, which can be said to be the most expensive component of the entire TWS earphones.
Different main control chips will give TWS earphones performance differences, such as Bluetooth version, noise cancellation performance, microphone reception, etc. Take the Kirin HiSilicon A2 chip carried by Huawei FreeBuds Pro 3 earbuds as an example, the chip adopts a dual DSP architecture, which increases computing power by 50%, helps to provide efficient signal processing capabilities, immersive space and accurate noise reduction, and can also provide 8M Bluetooth physical transmission rate, which is a super CD-level lossless audio signal transmission, bringing users a listening experience with rich details and complete sound quality.
In addition to Apple, Huawei and other giants' TWS headphones will use self-developed chips, Qualcomm, Realtek and other chip manufacturers will also design some mid-to-high-end SoC chip solutions for high-end TWS headphones that emphasize sound quality and comprehensive application experience, but the vast majority of 50 yuan TWS headphones, in the choice of chip solutions, the first element is always cost, and some entry-level SoC chips are only a quarter or even less than a fifth of Qualcomm.
Many speculative brands will purchase the lowest-end SOC chip solution to reduce costs, and then pass 199 yuan, 299 yuan free shipping such ** to earn a wave of money, more black-hearted brands will modify the chip number, using the form of "low-end chip grinding + firmware", pretending to be high-end chips, and then raising the price of the product to 199 yuan, 299 yuan to make huge profits, such "fake" products often in noise reduction, stability, voice interaction and other applications simply do not reach the level of 100 yuan TWS headphones, which belongs to the pit that consumers need to avoid as much as possible.
In addition to the TWS earbuds, the TWS earphones are also equipped with a charging compartment, which consists of a battery, a charging IC, and a power management IC to charge the earphones. The charging compartment industry chain is relatively mature, and there is little difference between different products.
Homogenization has plunged TWS headphones into the Red Sea of competition
A closer look at the TWS headphones on the market that are less than 100 yuan will find that from the headphones to the packaging design, the differences between different brands of TWS headphones are probably only the difference in logo and brand, which is the homogenization problem brought by OEM.
Generally speaking, the production process of a set of TWS earphones is as follows: design product characteristics according to requirements -ID design - structural design - mold opening - small batch trial production - mass production.
In order to provide consumers with a differentiated product experience, players who mainly focus on the mid-to-high-end TWS headset market often optimize on the basis of the chip after getting the TWS headset chip, design their own software and hardware solutions, and polish the stability of the chip platform, the experience of the whole machine components, waterproof, power consumption, noise reduction, mass production efficiency, yield and other aspects, and conduct assembly tests of the whole machine for many times. If a mature, proven chip platform is used, this process can take more than 6 months at the earliest; If the first-chip platform is used, then the process will take about 10 to 12 months.
Obviously, brands that will not wait so long, let alone really do R&D and innovation, and the mature production chain in the south has also greatly reduced the manufacturing threshold of TWS earphones. If the manufacturer uses the existing public board and public model, the minimum cost of the scheme is less than 20 yuan, and the circuit board and software have been written in advance, and it only takes 1 or 2 months to achieve mass production. This has also led to the emergence of all kinds of ultra-low** "high imitation airpods" headphones on the current market.
It is claimed that it can break through the original Huaqiang North top TWS headphones
Innovation is the only way to break through
While low-cost TWS headphones lower the threshold for consumers to buy, they also make many brands fall into the quagmire of the first war. Low prices can indeed increase shipments and even share in a short period of time, but once they fall into the low-end "quagmire", they will only fall deeper and deeper. Manufacturers who have been hovering in the low-end market for a long time, once they want to develop in the high-end market, it will take a certain amount of time to change the image of the low-end.
In addition to the pursuit of sound quality to gain more favor from mid-to-high-end consumers, functional innovation has become the focus of the new generation of TWS headphones. Today, TWS headphones are evolving towards intelligent functions, including health detection, wireless transmission and social functions, intelligent control, stereo sound, active noise cancellation, intelligent selective noise cancellation, human-computer interaction and other functions. The components involved are also different, such as heart rate sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, optical sensors, etc., to meet the hardware requirements of different functions.
There are some natural advantages to doing vital signs monitoring in headphones. For example, when using photoelectric sensors to measure heart rate, blood oxygen, and blood pressure, if you wear it on your wrist, you will often encounter the problem of black ** and hairy hair, and the light reflection signal is very weak, or even completely absent; For example, in winter, especially in the north, the wrist** is very dry, and the collection of electrocardiogram (ECG) will encounter the problem of dry electrodes, which will also cause signal distortion;
In addition, the movement of the wrist is complex, and when the MEMS sensor is used to capture the motion information and then compensate for other sensors, the algorithm is extremely complex, and the compensation effect is often not ideal. And if you are in headphones, all these problems will be greatly simplified or even solved.
In addition, a big factor limiting the effectiveness of the current TWS Bluetooth connection is the lag of the Bluetooth standard, which currently has Bluetooth 60 standards are being developed if Bluetooth 60 can solve the problem of audio dual-channel transmission, then the TWS headset chip pattern will usher in another round of change.