While I generally agree with you, I should point out a few things regarding noise cancellation. Noise cancellation doesn't require anything from the phone. Mos

While I generally agree with you, I should point out a few things regarding noise cancellation. Noise cancellation doesn't require anything from the phone. Most noise cancellation works by placing a small mic on the headphones, sampling the ambient noise, and playing an anti-phase waveform of the noise through the speakers to cancel the noise. While you could use the phone mic to do that, it's not necessary (and probably inferior, if the phone is in a pocket). Or were you referring to the fact that a digital signal degrades in the presence of noise more gracefully? (Lowered bandwidth rather than pops/artifacts.) (Technically, you don't even need digital signals to stop noise from being picked up in the wires; balanced cables will do this just fine with an analog signal, though admittedly, balanced headphones are not standard consumer gear.)