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Is it true that wireless earpieces usually suffer from a sound quality degradation (because wireless signals are lossy?)

I'm not talking about a wireless headset, but a wireless earpiece like those:

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I don't know but I doubt it... everything is digital nowadays, it's not so lossy like analog. – Mehrdad Aug 8 '11 at 7:22
hey isn't this considered computer hardware? why is it off topic? – Pacerier Aug 8 '11 at 15:31
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closed as off topic by techie007, Ivo Flipse♦ Aug 8 '11 at 11:51

Questions on Super User are expected to generally relate to computer software or computer hardware, within the scope defined in the faq.

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Some wireless headphones (which is what I assume you're talking about, although many of your pictures are of headsets) use analog transmitters, which are very likely to suffer from audible signal degradatiion. Others use lossless digital transmission.

Digital standards like 'Kleer' allow for lossless transmission of audio to the headphones, so the audio quality should be just as good as ordinary wired headphones (of course, the headphones themselves could vary in quality).

Both types could suffer from interference issues, but for a lossless digital communication, either the sound will be received or not; there will be no actual loss of quality (just loss of signal). Interference for the analog headphones would be perceptible as noise.

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no i'm not talking about headphones. either headsets, or those really tiny ones, the earpiece – Pacerier Aug 8 '11 at 7:51
If you're talking about the ones sold at spyfield.com/en/product.asp, then those do appear to use analog transmitters (hence lossy). I don't know whether the quality of the driver is enough to expose flaws from the transmission; anyway, they're not really designed for music - it takes a lot less bandwidth for voice. – user55325 Aug 8 '11 at 8:02
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The earpieces you linked to are Bluetooth so they are virtually all lossy, but to be more specific, they are encoding audio for digital transport at less than 44.1 kHz/16 bit CD quality.

Continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSD or CVSDM) is common in voice transfer for Bluetooth headsets. From Wikipedia: 64 kbit/s CVSD is one of the options to encode voice signals in telephony-related Bluetooth service profiles, e.g. between mobile phones and wireless headsets. The other options are PCM with logarithmic a-law or μ-law quantization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVSD

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