You completely missed the point of my post. I am specifically excluding subjective, qualitative statements. You want to talk about why you personally like something, and that’s nice, but it’s seriously not the discussion at hand.
I have Apple devices, I use Bluetooth speakers in several places throughout my house, as well as in my car, the difference is that I’m willing to accept the reality that Bluetooth has limitations that make it inferior to an analog connection, and I’m willing to accept the fact that some of my devices are proprietary largely so that the company that makes them can take more money from me.
What I was/am/will object to until it is no longer true is the notion that Bluetooth is superior to a headphone jack. In every measurable way apart from the existence of a wire, the answer is no. Bluetooth is, at best, on par, and at worst, much worse. I only brought up the Lightning connector and the headphone adapter for it because the person that I was originally talking to claimed that the Lightning connector granted the phone audio capabilities greater than the analog jack. I pointed out that this was untrue because the Lightning adapter is literally a USB DAC attached to a headphone jack. It’s nothing special, it’s literally the same thing that was inside of the phone, now it’s on the outside. The stuff about it being able to support surround sound and such has nothing to do with the connector, you can trunk surround sound over a standard stereo phono plug, the extra channels are matrix encoded into the stereo signal, not entirely lossless, but good enough, and in no way exclusive to, or aided by the Lightning connector.
Based on my interactions with them elsewhere, I believe that the person you’re replying to has a fairly poor understanding of the technical side of things. Latency can be reduced using a protocol like aptX, but that’s proprietary, and both the source and sink have to support it. I wrote a fairly lengthy technical post, and this person’s response was mainly about how they really like the Lightning connector better than micro USB, and some rambling about how great Apple was for “kicking the PC market” into supporting USB in general, even though Windows 95 had support for it in August of 97 and the original iMac, the first mainstream computing device to ship with onboard USB support (in lieu of all “legacy” interconnects), didn’t ship until almost an entire year later, and it wasn’t like the PC industry was against USB. It is cheaper to implement USB than it is to implement multiple single/narrow-purpose interconnects.
It’s wild to consider how much legacy technology keeps the world running. It really ticks me off how much effort is put into getting around royalty free technology. It’s like there’s an urge in the heart of some people to extract as much economic rent from others as possible. Even if their technology is crap by comparison to the legacy stuff.
This is an archival librarian we’re talking about - the information is supposed to be preserved, not listened to!
Think antiquarian book-‘dealer’.
More seriously, I suppose it doesn’t matter if the recording medium degrades a bit with use as long as it doesn’t degrade faster than alternative media become so obsolete they can’t be read either.
