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I am an audiophile and I don't miss the headphone jack at all. I've always hated the headphone jack on most phones since most of them are inherently low qualit

I am an audiophile and I don't miss the headphone jack at all. I've always hated the headphone jack on most phones since most of them are inherently low quality. If you have a high end headphone then the weakest link usually is the DAC ( Digital to Analog ) chip on your device. While there are some devices which are made with high fidelity audio in mind ( LG V30 which does come with a headphone jack ), most of the devices in the market aren't. Also good high fidelity headphones usually have higher resistance ( I use DT770 Pro regularly with is rated at 250 ohms ) and almost none of the phones in market today can drive them to the best of their ability. Historically I've always carried a mini amp(Fiio A3) to use my headphones with headphone jacks in my phone to be able to get good audio quality from headphones. Mobile devices just don't have enough juice to give you good sound quality and drive high end headphones to the best of their ability. Even headphones rated at 32 ohms can benefit hugely from a higher audio output. So for me, audio from a mobile device comes down to 2 use cases: 1. Calling and other low-fidelity tasks I have a sennheiser bluetooth headphones which supports AptX for these purposes. Bluetooth is lossy and AptX gives you much better audio quality. They are rated at 10+ hours and usually work pretty well for calling and other light uses. 2. Listening to audio I carry a portable DAC ( Fiio X3) but there are many portable ones available in the market. If you have an iPhone you can get the Fiio i1 which is based on apple's lightning. A portable DAC will usually come with it's own Amp and the audio output will be far better than what a standard phone is capable of. If you have high end headphones you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much difference a good DAC+Amp combo can make. I exclusively use TIDAL for audio streaming since their lossless audio has much higher fidelity compared to other streaming providers.

rkangel 8y ago
Using phone audio in a way that benefits from that extra increase in audio quality is the minority case (based on my observations). Most people listen on the their phone when they are 'out and about', walking in town with car noise in the background, on the subway etc.. In those environments, the returns diminish quite quickly past a decent pair of noise isolating in ear headphones. This is the case for which the new situation is the unarguable improvement, but I think it's rare enough that consumers as a group have lost more than they gain.

rkangel 8y ago

Using phone audio in a way that benefits from that extra increase in audio quality is the minority case (based on my observations). Most people listen on the their phone when they are 'out and about', walking in town with car noise in the background, on the subway etc.. In those environments, the returns diminish quite quickly past a decent pair of noise isolating in ear headphones. This is the case for which the new situation is the unarguable improvement, but I think it's rare enough that consumers as a group have lost more than they gain.