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.
But the outside part covers the inside and is the only part that goes inside. The inside is still inside while being inside your ear protecting the inside of your ear from the inside of the earbud.
If you look at pretty much all earphones and earbuds, you’ll see they have a screen mesh where the sound comes out. You can remove this mesh (depending on the device, it might take some effort), and very often you’ll find an accumulation of earwax. I had a pair of Galaxy Buds+ that I needed to clean when I noticed the sound was unusually low.
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.