Two-sentence summary:

I have come to rediscover the mature micro-industry of (wireless) audio gear that can be used to watch TV without using your primary speakers. Today, pairing most bluetooth headphones with a smart tv like a Fire Stick is convenient. I have recently paired some cheap smart glasses with my Fire Stick, and liked the experience so much I’ve decided to write about it.

Rediscovery!

Devices that have been made to help people watch TV without disturbing the rest of the house have existed since before I was born, and I’ve done some research to find when IR / RF wireless headphones were first marketed towards private TV enjoyment. The answer seems to be 1998.

(I found an ad for the Koss “Korcless” “Stereophone” here, on page 76, a wireless IR headset from 1988. Koss’s own website advertises another pair of IR headphones released in 1989.)

Side note: a lot of Koss’s early advertising is really, really good.

From those not-quite-bluetooth headsets that always confused a younger me when at estate sales, this is an industry whose heyday has seemingly come and gone. Maybe it was that early 2000’s technology becoming obsolete so quickly, or maybe it’s because everyone pivoted to watching things on laptops and phones instead.

After all, what’s more private than the phone screen you can cup in your hands?

However, the concept isn’t dead yet. Roku sells Smart TV remotes with a headphone jack built in. Sony used to sell (pretty recently) these neat wireless 'neckphones' that pass through the audio when not in use, and transfer the audio to a personal speaker just by taking them off their cradle.

It’s hard to compete with the convenience of a phone or an iPad for private watching, but for over four decades, those who wanted the full couch experience, remote and all, knew that you couldn’t settle for less.

All you is need something that pipes the audio from your TV to your ears in a more efficient manner.

Personal routine

(Read my Open Ears article to see my previous thoughts.)

In the age of smart TVs, it really couldn’t be easier to set this up - with a Fire Stick, I found that Bluetooth headphones are supported, easy to use, and seamless to integrate into an existing setup.

I decided to dedicate my Razer Anzu Smart Glasses to the task - they’re cheap, sound decently good, and they have the most intuitive “on” switch that’s ever been made.

More specifically, while they started at $200 when first announced, they were quickly put on sale, and eventually, they went on fire sale, being sold for $25 new from Razer. They seem to have escaped the bargain bin, being sold new for around $45 or $60.

Out of all the smart glasses with speakers that I’ve used (4), the Razers come in second for audio quality - behind the Meta Raybans. Two things to note: I haven’t tried the Bose Frames (they’re too expensive on my local Facebook Marketplace and eBay), and the Razer Anzu’s are so much cheaper (today) than the Meta Raybans, that it’s a little unfair to compare them to each other.

Lastly, how do you turn the Razer Anzu’s on? You open them up. It’s ridiculously simple, and yet nearly every other pair of smart glasses manages to royally screw this up. Open? On. Closed? Off.

Here’s what every other gadget decides to do:

The (first gen) Alexa Frames from Amazon require a long press of the power button. Also, They go in this “power save” mode if you put them upside down and leave them absolutely still. Amazon famously sells Alexa hardware at-cost, so why cheap out on the hardware? Why was there no arm angle sensor?

The Soundcore Frames have this capacitive skin sensor right where the side of the frames goes over your ears and have some accelerometer programming to turn them on, but in practice, they turned themselves on inside a glasses case all the time, and didn’t turn on when I put them on my face on numerous occasions, requiring me to take them off, hold the spot where the capacitive sensor is with both hands, and hold them near my head so I could hear them chime awake. A failure on the hardware team, or maybe just unintuitive enough to require a hard look at the manual.

The Meta Raybans do a lot of trickery involving contact sensors and arm opening sensors, but it’s done right. Additionally, they have a physical switch that turns them off. This has been reliable and hasn’t given me trouble since I bought them. It all works great, but nothing beats simplicity, which is why I like their physical power switch.

The only downside to the Anzus is that their charging situation is unideal. Each arm needs its own magnetic connector, and each cable head is physically identical but has directional magnets, so you get the USB scenario where the first orientation is wrong, the second orientation is ALSO wrong, and going back to the first orientation somehow works. It’s just fiddly. I want to 3D print a holder for these cables, but that would just force me to ensure than one arm gets folded over another, which introduces yet another thing to have to keep in mind when I just want to toss them back, leave the TV, and do something else.

Also, while not necessarily specific to the Anzu’s, something is broken with Netflix, where the sound is completely unintelligble, being sped up and super high pitch. Other apps on the Fire TV like Youtube don’t have this issue. It could be Netflix, it could be some DRM-bluetooth codec-fire tv firmware glitch, but whatever it is, means I have to listen to Gilmore Girls out loud, to the disappointment of my roommate.

Specifically about the Anzu’s, it’s wise to wait just a few seconds after unplugging them from the charger before opening them up. The logic that turns them on when you open the glasses up doesn’t boot up immediately.

TLDR

But, if I want to watch TV, I just take the glasses and put them on. Seamlessly, they turn on, connect to the last bluetooth device they used (which is the Fire TV), and the Fire TV’s volume controls switch from your TV / receiver to controlling the glasses’ volume. When I’m done, I close them up and click the chargers onto the glasses.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that a Fire Stick + Razer Anzu is a very cheap, very convenient way to watch TV without upsetting the roommates that gets remarkably close to an Apple TV + Airpods experience, and I think that this market is due for a resurgence soon.

Extra notes

Even though some hypothetical pair of smart glasses that you wear all day that could automatically switch the TV audio to them sound like a good idea, this switching could be unintentional, leading to you walking in a room, and all of a sudden the TV show that everyone was watching has been contained to your ears only. You could say “OK, put an extra step on either the glasses (push a button, nod your head, respond to some voice assistant, etc.) or in the smart TV’s software that displays some “switch audio to ___” toast message, but you’ve just made this process not automatic. By keeping the Anzu’s as a dedicated device, somewhere near the TV or couch, ready to go, this becomes an intentional act of audio transferral, and decreases the possibility of accidental switching to near-zero, unless little Timmy found the glasses and started playing around with them.