You should really use your quote marks more consistently. I’m not sure what “audio jacks held up for me better than 1/8” is supposed to mean. Or are you being “sarcastic”?
SCNR. I’ll see myself “out”, shall I?
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Read again, its not mismatched quotes or air quotes, the " goes after the fraction to indicate inches.
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Oh, one more thing: there’s an app… Erm… Codec for that.
Actually, there are three? Four?
This is what I was ranting about above. Fuck this.
But at least, Sony (of all manufacturers! It gets weirder by the minute!) has put it’s codec into ASOP. Does not help if you’re using Apple products, I guess. And does not help if your friggin headphones don’t support LDAC.
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again, no, not that. you may find that people who’ve worked in audio don’t use the metric sizing for audio jacks.
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Pssst. I was pulling your leg. Don’t tell anyone.
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Quite right and here’s a fun bit (as previously pointed out by @Medievalist) That old analog audio jack is fully capable of sending digital audio signals to external headphones with a built in DAC so you can get those benefits with the “old” 3.5mm jack
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Come on, we’re all supposed to be a little more adult than this here. If you were actually sorry about something, you wouldn’t start your apology by mocking people. What you’re actually sorry about is being caught saying something incorrect in a public forum and then getting called out about it.
The gracious thing to do would be to say something like “aw damn, I guess I was wrong about that after all” that and move on, not passive-aggressively delete posts and offering insincere apologies. No one would have blamed you or been upset–you were wrong about a very technical thing that people have been paid a lot of money specifically to make you and as many other people wrong about as possible. You could have even just ignored those people if you still felt you were right but couldn’t be bothered to do any independent research. Instead you just went straight for the “melodramatic internet theatrics” response which nobody likes, anywhere, ever.
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1/4" forever!
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I was not wrong.
But I was not interested in the barrage of religious-level loathing of proprietary ports that I received and could tell would continue. Therefore I deleted all posts stating facts and opinions about them, including the ones with links to independent research and data supporting my thoughts. But thank you for your opinions on my adulthood.
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There’s something really satisfying with that click of plugging in a 1/4" patch cable or guitar cable! Even the little ones that go between stomp boxes. In truth I’ve put extra stomp boxes in line between my bass and amp sometimes just to enjoy that click.
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From my point of view, it is. I just need to plug in on plug when I get in my car, since lightning covers both audio and power.
When I’m at the gym or on my bicycle, and sometimes at work, I use AirPods, which come in a very convenient package. I got those months ago, when my phone still had a headphone jack. Which I barely used, because the cable is a frigging nuisance.
When I’m in the kitchen, I use the inbuilt speakers, which are totally sufficient for podcasts and audio plays.
Otherwise, I use the speakers of my computer or use AirPlay, which is connected to an ancient, but sufficient Sony Receiver, with 5 identical boxes plus subwoofer.
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The your setup is very very broken, as the delay is know and adjusted for.
Fun fact: Our brain does this in real life, up to 50 meters or so. The processing of visual input is delayed until the audio of the event arrives.
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I don’t loath any of the digital stuff, personally.
I just like the robust and enduring design of the audio jack. The springy bit that gives haptic feedback to the user while letting the device sense insertion events without using any standby power. The phenomenal ease of use in real world environments (you can not only remove or insert by feel, you can actually clean it in total darkness if you’re afraid it’s gotten mud on it). The axial arrangement of thick conductive surfaces that allows use of specialized materials (gold, chrome, &etc) and obviates issues of alignment. It’s just physically a nice connector, a work of art - I’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of connectors and I do admire the audio jack.
Now, it’s true you do have to design your circuitry to deal with the possibility of half-inserted cables and resultant cross-connections - as @jhharvest notes, this problem gets worse as you stack more rings on the shaft. And it’s true that the original jack was 1/4" but the mini and submini are measured in mm, which is slightly philosophically annoying. But these minor issues are like a tiny smallpox scar on a beautiful face - overshadowed by the whole.
I think people tend to edge into engineering religious arguments vis-à-vis connectors when they start talking about specific use cases, like for example playing music from a phone. The tradeoffs between charging and doing I/O and wirelessness tend to reflect personal values that aren’t universal (I think wireless charging ought to be outlawed, for example, which is clearly a minority viewpoint!). But a lot of us here are talking about the audio jack as an engineering marvel, and it truly is that. True elegance requires simplicity…
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You were.
Several people, including myself, provided you with real, quantitative technical information about how Bluetooth audio streaming, analog headphone jacks, and the way that the Lightning audio connector works. You rejected all of that, and now even though you’re “done” with the conversation you’re still sitting here arguing with people.
This isn’t “religious-level loathing” because we are not talking about any of the subjective factors. Bluetooth works in a manner that is fundamentally different than analog audio jacks in ways that impose very specific limitations on things like bitrate and deferral of DAC to the sink rather than the source itself. Clever things have been done to reduce these limitations, but they are still very much there and it is a pretty commonly understood thing in the right circles.
As for the Lightning connector, others object to it because it’s largely superfluous, and people see it as little more than a cash grab by Apple. It’s effectively a reimplementation of USB that provides some mechanical advantages over micro USB, and the protocol only really differs for the sake of making it harder to develop unlicensed third-party peripherals.
When you plug your Lightning to analog headphone adapter into your phone, you are literally plugging the same kind of DAC and jack that used to be inside your phone into what functionally amounts to a USB port
on the outside of your phone. The lightning port isn’t doing anything better or different than a set of USB speakers, it’s just connected via a proprietary interconnect. Even the stuff about surround sound support has nothing at all to do with the connector or the dongle, that’s functionality that has existed for a long time thanks to matrix encoding.
If Apple wants to have proprietary interconnects, that’s their own deal and if people are willing to pay for it, that’s their own business. I don’t really care about people using it, literally the only thing that I care about in this situation is technical accuracy. It’s technically accurate to say what I’ve said about the Lightning connector, even if some of the words sound “bad” I’m not casting personal judgment on it, I’m realistically describing its strengths and weaknesses. Would you like me to give you a quantitative list of problems with USB-C too? There are some pretty significant and measurable problems with how that’s played out as well–there’s a guy at Google who spends an inordinate amount of time buying and testing USB-C accessories because it’s possible to fuck manufacturing a cable up badly enough to permanently damage one of the endpoints. That’s absolute lunacy. Would you like me to tell you a bunch of things that are wrong about Android on a technical level? Windows? Linux? AIX? SCO? I can give you pretty well informed assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of all of those too.
So are we having a question about quantifiable facts, or are we talking about how you feel about stuff? I can’t speak for anybody else, but all I give a shit about within the context of this discussion is accuracy; brand favoritism is a huge mistake.
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It’s not a question of practicality, it’s a question of technical specifications and having a realistic understanding of what things are and do. The lightning connector is effectively a proprietary reimplementation of USB. The connector provides distinct mechanical advantages over microUSB and arguably USB-C, but in terms of technical capabilities, it does the same thing. When you plug the dongle into your phone, what you’re doing is attaching a DAC to a serial bus that pipes digital audio into a chip that turns it into analog signals. That’s it. They took a thing that was inside of your phone and put it on the outside. That stuff is objective. We could argue about some of the specific pros and cons of various technical choices, but the overall statement isn’t up for discussion because it just is.
If we want to talk subjectivity, however, how is it just the one cable? in your car? Either you’re using a charge + headphone adapter, or you’re not charging your phone. If you’re using a charge + headphone adapter, that means you’re leaving two cables plus a dongle lying around your car. To use your own phrase, that sounds like a “frigging nuisance” to me.
You also mentioned cycling. I also cycle a lot, and VASTLY prefer wired earbuds if I listen to anything at all. (Because safety, and also it’s about the only only application which I can tolerate earbuds for) I put my phone in a zippered pocket of my Camelbak and control playback from the headphones themselves. Why? Because if the earbud falls out, the worst that will happen is it will land on my shoulder. If you drop an Airpod in a puddle, you’re out over $160 USD which seems pretty damned inconvenient to me.
I also feel that both the wired and wireless earbuds currently sold by Apple are very uncomfortable compared to older designs, and only provide better sound quality for people with ears that conform to a certain shape which mine lack. Again, I didn’t bring any of that up because it’s subjective and applies only to me. Other people swear they’re the best thing they’ve ever listened to.
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That’s surprising. Don’t vinyl disks wear down a little bit every time you play them? (I’m still surprised we still haven’t seen cheap and widely available laser turntables.)
I like how when you’re trying to connect stereo speakers to a mono source, you can carefully slide the connector out until the mono signal ends up in each of the speakers. But then, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a mono source.
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… for a more civilized age.
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You said it isn’t better. It is better for me.
Yes. Except that it was Apple who kicked the PC market so hard that they adopted USB in the first place. And than the USB people started sleeping again. USB-C is nice and I’d like using it on my phone, too. Unfortunately, they didn’t get their shit together and it was either Lightning or Micro-USB. I have the latter on my Kindle and boy, is that some shitty plug. Since I have to charge it weekly, I hate it with a passion. Probably going to get some Qi adapter or one of those magnetic plugs.
Incidentally, I gave both an iPad Mini and Kindle to my octogenarian mother with limited mobility in her hands. Among other things it was a pain seeing her fumble with the Kindle’s connector, while Lightning poses no trouble.
(Again, USB-C looks as good, but came 4 years late to the party.)
I know how it works, thanks. Well, the DAC is actually still there, so the inbuilt speakers can work. They did take out some stuff nonetheless. Sure. I don’t mind if they take out stuff I don’t need. I don’t miss the CD player. I don’t miss the floppy disk. I don’t miss the 5¼ drive. Oh wait, that actually was external on my 2nd computer in 1988.
Yes, I am. This makes it effectively one cable to me. Okay, technically one plug, because my car’s old tech. My colleague, OTOH, just plugs in lightning and everything, including audio and video, goes over that.
I always had two cables. One for audio. One for charging. Two plugs. AUX input and DC connector are right next to each other. Lazy as I am. I just used heat-shrink tubing to turn it into one cable with two plugs. Now it’s effectively one cable with one plug.
Yes, fine by me. You can use the lightning headset. Personally, I didn’t even unpack mine.
I don’t listen to music so loud that I can’t hear the traffic. Also, for my commute I’m separated from car traffic for all but 400 meters or so.
My ears are lucky, AirPods fit tightly but not too tight. Never fell out. I guess they could in an accident, but then I’d probably have bigger concerns than some 160 USD. My glasses certainly cost me.
AirPods, by the way, don’t sound best to me either. None of those small earphones do.
But they also work very well was a headset, as I regular take voice notes and I have yet hear complaints from the people I talked on the phone. And I asked and called myself on the landline to check.
It is? By whom? You know a way to get rid of the lag on my Amazon Firestick?
