Five ways to listen

Buying headphones as a present usually fails on the same assumption: that there is one best pair. There is not, because listening is not one activity. Five situations, and the thing that actually suits each.

Start with the pair that has no battery. Wired headphones are the ones that are never flat, never pairing, and never the reason a call did not happen. For anybody at a desk, or anybody who has spent a year being told a device is at twenty percent, this is not a step backwards.

Outside, the requirement inverts. Open-ear earbuds sit in front of the ear rather than in it, so traffic, bicycles and the person talking to you all still exist. For running or cycling that is a safety argument rather than an audio one, and it is the reason this shape has taken over from the sealed kind.

Then the exact opposite. Over-ear headphones with active noise cancelling are for the train, the open-plan office and the flight, and what they are really for is not hearing music better but hearing everything else less. A day on a train is the clearest demonstration anybody gets of what the feature is worth.

Some listening is not private at all. A small stereo speaker is the one other people in the room end up using, which makes it the least personal thing here and often the most used. It is also the only item on this page that a household argues over.

And the one that goes where a speaker should not. A pocket-sized wireless speaker is not trying to be the good one - it is trying to be the one in the bag when somebody wants music in a kitchen, a tent or a bathroom. That is a different job, and the small ones do it because they are the ones that came along.