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Having worked on Audio Codecs and even though my livelihood depends on it, I would like to say 3.5mm jacks suck! You need to figure out how much resistive and h
by tonmoy 4y ago
Having worked on Audio Codecs and even though my livelihood depends on it, I would like to say 3.5mm jacks suck! You need to figure out how much resistive and how much capacitive load any headphone has. You need to detect if it has mic, if it does is it US or China standard. Need to make sure that the DAC and amplifier don’t consume too much power yet have a good dynamic range for arbitrary cable length. Let the phone send digital audio data along with power using USB-C and have the earpieces play the audio, it’d be much simpler IMO
- dhosek 4y agoI remember being a little shocked to discover that I had better battery life on my phone with Bluetooth than I did with a wired connection.
- kevingadd 4y agoThe dac is running off the batteries in your Bluetooth headphones, so that's a pretty natural outcome.
- akvadrako 4y agoThe size of batteries in two piece earbuds is miniscule and would not make a difference in phone runtime.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoAnd the power amp which probably consumes more power than the DAC.
- theshrike79 4y ago...and people still want to manually disable bluetooth on their phone "because it eats up their battery". Dude. You posting that message to FB took more power than your idling bluetooth will spend all week :D
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoI turn it off because historically it's just less secure WiFi, and, bonus, junk to use more often than not.
- hajile 4y agoYour Bluetooth headphones have their own batteries. They also have terrible sound quality compared to equivalently priced wired IEMs because powering multiple drivers/speakers per ear for maximum quality takes more power.
- endgame 4y agoThat's a shame, but at least you can't run DRM over a 3.5mm cable.
- stodor89 4y agoI suspect that's why everyone's dropping it.
- tshaddox 4y agoI tend to doubt that. Even ten years ago on enthusiast music piracy sites it was quite rare to see pirated analog recordings of DRMed digital audio. There isn’t even widely used end-to-end audio DRM like HDCP, is there?
- stodor89 4y ago10 years ago, there wasn't a good reason to do that. 10 years from now, who knows... The more lock-in, the "better"!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CameronNemo 4y agoYou really want to take up your only usb-c port for headphones? Would be nice if they gave an extra USB port to compensate for the loss. Also USB can do analog audio supposedly...
- charcircuit 4y ago>Also USB can do analog audio supposedly... That's how the USB-C to 3.5mm adapters work for if you need to use headpones which don't have a USB-C cable.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoI'm pretty sure USB-C adapters have tiny little DAC ICs embedded inside them. They show up to the phone as a USB sound card. A lot of USB-C cables have little ICs built into them. It's required as part of the PD spec. A port isn't supposed to provide a laptop with 60W or whatever unless the cable itself communicates that it's rated for it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoLike everything USB-C, there's several incompatible ways to do it.
- LinAGKar 4y agoThere is both. Some phones, e.g. OnePlus, have analog audio output on USB-C and can use a passive adapter. If the phone lacks analog output, e.g. Samsung, it needs an active adapter with a USB controller and DAC like you mentioned.
- hajile 4y agoPassing an analog signal fractions of a millimeter from a bunch of digital signals is a recipe for very crappy sound. I have yet to find an analog USB-C audio adapter that didn’t have terrible quality and usually some hissing or other noise too.
- guelo 4y agoSo hard yet millions of devices, cheap and expensive, had no problem providing it for decades.
- programmer_dude 4y agoLol bluetooth sucks a 1000x more. The protocol stack is itself a nightmare.
- jsemrau 4y agoBluetooth is terrible. My gripes are: 1. Re-connect from mobile to desktop takes minutes. 2. Batteries need to be charged (and are always not charged when it matters)
- Bolkan 4y agoSony xm4 and xm5 have dual connectivity.
- colordrops 4y agoSame with Bose. But I have two desktops and a phone, and never know which two are connected. Why limit it to two? Seems arbitrary and unnecessarily limiting.
- faeriechangling 4y agoGenerally multiple bluetooth signals seems to degrade the overall audio quality. The AirPods are the only product in the same class that can sort of link to more than 2 devices... but all of them need to be apple.
- searchableguy 4y agoThey don't support multiple Bluetooth audio connection at the same. They basically quick switch between devices in the background.
- colordrops 4y agoI'd be fine with that. The Bose headphones seem to be doing something similar as only one device can play audio at a time.
- raverbashing 4y ago> figure out how much resistive and how much capacitive load any headphone has This is not and has never been a problem for consumer based devices. All headphones are made +/- with the same impedance. > Need to make sure that the DAC and amplifier don’t consume too much power yet have a good dynamic range for arbitrary cable length If cable length is an issue for you then you're using a really bad cable. I mean, really bad. Or have a severely underpowered output amplifier. Analog is simpler than digital. And if you think your cheap headphone will do sound better than the phone manufacturers I have a bridge to sell to you
- mellavora 4y ago> This is not and has never been a problem for consumer based devices. All headphones are made +/- with the same impedance. A quick search for "high-impedance headphones" might be enlightening on this topic. For example, Beyerdynamic offers 32, 80, and 250 ohm versions of several of their models. > If cable length is an issue for you then you're using a really bad cable. I mean, really bad. Or have a severely underpowered output amplifier. A cable has both resistance and capacitance, which means every cable is also a low pass filter. If you are tuning the DAC/amplifier with power consumption as one of the criteria, then actually, yes, you will want the output power as low as possible -- which means cable length is a factor in the optimization.
- raverbashing 4y ago> For example, Beyerdynamic offers 32, 80, and 250 ohm versions of several of their models. Yes and you know what happens when you plug a higher impedance phone in a low impedance output right? (and the point is moot because we're talking about consumer devices) > Headphones with impedance greater than 100 ohms are typically older or professional studio specific design (or valve outputs - because of course it's "audiophile stuff") https://www.headphonesty.com/2019/04/headphone-impedance-demystified/ https://www.headphonesty.com/2019/04/headphone-impedance-dem... > A cable has both resistance and capacitance, which means every cable is also a low pass filter. A cable is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line and while it is technically a low-pass filter you have to show me actual numbers to convince me that it will significantly affect, let's say > 10kHZ at usual headphone cable lengths.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoThose all sound like good things to optimize to make a really good headphone driver, but they aren't strictly necessary are they? "Standard" line level analog audio has been a thing for what, 90 years? I could explain to an 8 year old how it works. It's very simple. Embedding an IC into a cable that talks USB 2.0 doesn't seem like a simplification to me. I'm a staff level embedded engineer, and I wish an 8 year old could explain to me how that all works. Any DAC still ideally does all the things you listed optimally, so you're just externalizing the same complexity by leveraging the marvels of modern technology. It's a pain to have to carry another dongle. They feel like they're going to damage my USB-C port when plugged in inside my pocket. Do buttons even work at all with those adapters? I'd rather the smartphone engineers build an awesome DAC and charge me an extra $15 for the phone, rather than have to buy a $15 dongle of questionable quality on Amazon, or a $50 dongle of even worse quality from Best Buy or something.
- RF_Savage 4y agoThe USB-C audio mode just pushes analog audio over the pins, so the hards DAC stuff stays inside the phone and just gets harder with all the multiplexing required. And fully agreed on USB-C ports being even more fragile in the pocket than 3.5mm.
- ginko 4y ago>You need to figure out how much resistive and how much capacitive load any headphone has. Why would you? That's part of the headphone's characteristics. People who buy high impedance headphones should know when to use an amplifier. That's not the DAC's job.
- thefz 4y agoYeah let's dump decades of electronics relying on different sized Jacks to the landfill for your convenience. And let's not forget that you can upsell the mini usb-c dongle for a decent margin! There's a middle ground working for everybody without going into audiophile territory.
- kalleboo 4y agoUSB-C is also a minefield - there are multiple incompatible ways to do audio over USB-C (including outputting it in analog for cheap adapters!)
- petra 4y agoThe 3.5mm jack/cable is much more reliable than a usb-c port.