In their defense, properly cleaning headphones is kinda hard, especially wireless earbuds.
Source : Used to work at an electronics repair shop that cleaned stuff, and even clean ‘looking’ (aka externally clean) headphones can have some disgusting junk on the inside.
Exactly! ‘My headphones are so quiet now, could the speaker be dying?’ is something we got all the time. Most of the time when people clean their headphones, all the do is take a wipe or a brush (if you’re lucky alcohol) and clean the outside of the mesh. Half the time all they’re doing is pushing earwax through the mesh so you get a nice little wax puck when you open them up.
It’s gross, but it did feel good to be able to tell people they didn’t need new headphones, we just cleaned them for $15.