I’m counting those as moldable ear plugs.
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Freeformat is a de-packetized bitstream version of MP3 that allows bitrates up to 640kbps. Originally it was just a codec testing format for MP3 so devs don’t have to worry about packetization overhead when writing new versions of LAME. A few tools came out that allow people to encode in freeformat now, but it’s not really “MP3” because it completely breaks how the bitstream is decoded by making it a continuous stream, basically one big packet per file.
And I thought you were referring to freeformat when you were saying “depends on what you mean by MP3.”
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With MP3 compression specifically another significant factor is the content of the audio file. The “perceptual coding algorithms” used make educated guesses about what frequency content you are willing to lose. It favors the kinds of harmonics one would usually in human voices and popular instruments. So, for a folk or rock track there really isn’t much difference ideally between properly compressed and uncompressed recordings. But this breaks down when one listens to inharmonic sounds, for example, a drum solo with prominent cymbal work.
If you listen to mostly atonal music, and/or do not have normal human frequency perception, then anything which discards audio in playback might be better avoided.
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Once again, even at 320 Kbit, you’re still using lossy compression on top
of lossy compression. Nothing is going to change this.
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ah, i get ya. no, I just meant that you might have a few audible glitches in low bitrate (or possibly in variable bit rate) encoding, but in 320 it’s not going to happen (personally I’m happy to stick with v0).
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not true. if both ends use the same codec you just transmit the bits as they are.
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Perhaps your Klipsch are heavy duty with 1/4" cord & jack, but every light headphone I’ve ever owned suffered either catastrophic failure of the cord at the jack or headset by catching on something, or the PVC wire casing suffered sclerosis from exposure to by body oils to the point it was unusably stiff. Perhaps a cloth covered cable might do better, but the few I’ve had failed from trauma first.
Since I listen almost exclusively to talk, I found the best plan was dollar store headphones. Then some years ago some local $ stores got in super light Magnavox branded headphones I really liked, and I bought like 30 of them. I’ve been slowly going through them, gluing on new ear foam, scavenging speakers from a dead one to repair another.
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I won’t miss it, because I won’t buy a piece of hardware that is fucking missing a standard feature.
I don’t see every manufacturer copying apple here, because they didn’t with proprietary audio/video cable nonsense before.
So I will have options available for my next phone/music player, because I am not loyal to any company that isn’t loyal to what matters to me as a consumer. In other words: I haven’t given Apple money in a while as it is.
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the highest quality bluetooth codec I’m aware of, aptX, doesn’t use psychoacoustic modelling. it’s a full spectrum, constant bit-rate thing AFAIK (not 100% on the details, it’s a proprietary thing as well so the exact scheme is under wraps).
I listen to a lot of atonal music, noise, music concrete, etc. Never had any problems with v0 mp3 myself, only glitches in my files are in the very old ones, buggy encoders probably (128kbps was very bad for a long time in the early days, mostly it’s more than good enough these days though).
I feel that way about the SD card port. What a nasty thing to leave off, so they can charge you many times as much per GB for the upsell model. The crude MP3 players I got early in the last decade had one, how could the mighty iPhone not? My very adequate Moto G has it, and cost me like 1/5 an iPhone.
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I don’t have a dog in this fight, because I don’t buy iPhones, but I will say the phone jack is decidedly not a marvelous bit of engineering.
The signal conductor makes contact before the ground conductor, which does bad things to audio circuits and is just completely unnecessary. Physically, the fact that they’re so much longer than they are wide causes mechanical stress and a high rate of solder joint failures with the jacks. An example of a connector with better engineering would be the DIN and mini-DIN connectors, in my opinion. There was in fact a 2 pin version of DIN that was sometimes used for speaker connections. If something had evolved from this for phones, that would have been better.
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I have one or two pieces of audio equipment that don’t use 3.5mm - they use old 1/4 inch jacks - but a simple non-electronic adapter plug fixes that. My car radio is just on the cusp of Bluetooth support - it’s smart enough to talk to the phone for phone calls, but not for music (3.5mm or USB memory stick work), and unfortunately the phone thinks the car radio is Bluetoothy enough to handle the audio for its GPS application, but the car radio doesn’t actually do that, so the audio gets lost.
I did just buy a Bluetooth mouse for my el-cheapo tablet - like an iPhone only having one Lightning connector, this tablet has only one USB connector, so I can’t simultaneously charge it and plug in the mouse with USB OTG. (I got a powered USB hub, but it turns out that’ll only power the mouse and other devices, not the tablet, unless I plug in the tablet into a slave port, in which case it gets power but isn’t the master than can talk to the mouse. Maybe Lightning’s smarter than that?) (At least the tablet also has a headphone jack, micro-SD port, and unfortunately-proprietary keyboard interface which is probably really USB with mechanically sturdy pins.)
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Bluetooth 5 (due next year) is getting a nice boost from being double the bandwidth and still low power.
I want that, I want the 3D spatializer controls and LF monitors on it, the energy harvesting in, maybe a swimming version on offer, and I want to not be murdered by design because the 'phones have 0 mics that aren’t dedicated to suppressing situational awareness. Or I can just wear up to 9kg of soundbar.
Having jacks (now with more conductors, the charging thing is news to me thanks. Imagining Apple just buying Dodge though…) Is that a good way to provide a balanced 42V rail, or is there a universal color-code for 7.2 hookups? No Qi adaptors for charger case owners this far out?
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The page I looked at said it was released July '16?
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Huh? Must be an updated version then. There’s one that Blu made that looks exactly like it and has nearly identical specs that came out a year or two ago.
In anycase, it covers quite a few bases… I’m disappointed, but not surprised that Google’s killed Project Ara. I’m guessing it was that you can’t make a phone completely modular that also won’t fall apart if you drop it.
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Perhaps I’m just better at taking care of my toys. I still have my first calculator (HP25 from the '70s), and it still works, as long as I don’t forget to use RPN. Heck, I still have my C64 computer, which also works.
Unless they’re actually plugged in, my Klipsch earphones stay in the nice cloth-sided zippered pouch they came in. I also use a lapel clip, to reduce the whole cable-getting-caught-on-things situation. Got a dozen of them from somewhere in China for $2.
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Only if they use the exact same compression schema.
You are aware that the removal of the floppy drive generated as much teeth gnashing 20 years ago as the removal of the audio jack does today, aren’t you? And that that was labeled as a dick move back then as well?
I don’t listen to music on my phone and I make phone calls in the hopelessly retro manner of holding my phone to my head. So unles Apple replaces the wired earbuds they bundle with the phone with a pair of enchanted ravens, (which would be cool), I don’t care either way. However, I have seen reports that the current market research shows that wireless earphones have reached the tipping point, and more and more people are switching to wireless every year.
Apple has a vision of their mobile phones beicoming truly wireless. That includes taking out the wired audio port, because they see it as becoming just as much of a fossil as the floppy was 20 years ago. Then, as now, their response to seeing that something was on the way to becoming obsolete is to cut it out early, after the majority of people have moved on from wired audio but before the remaining 49% are ready to say goodbye. Then, as now, there is much protesting. Sure, they could wait a year or so longer for the bulk of people to move off wired audio, but that’s not how they roll.
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Apple has a vision of a diminishing market with no revolutionary new products to back it up, and an opportunity to increase revenue from peripherals, a favourite trick of theirs.
I’d feel more comfortable accepting this reality than forcing myself to believe that in 2016 Apple’s vision of the future manifests itself as a new phone so close to the old phone it will probably fit into the same case, but without a headphone jack.
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You can’t listen and charge? Uh … Uh … Uh …
Basic error. That really is ridiculous.
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