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Bluetooth Won't Replace the Headphone Jack -- Walled Gardens Will (theverge.com)
Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.
Not going to buy a new set because Apple - or Google wants me to. Fuck them. I'd sooner switch cell phones. Eventually, the manufacturers will get the message.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I already have audio technica m50x's and beyerdynamic dt770s. I'm not buying a phone that they won't work with, and I'm not switching to your fucking bluetooth beats you greedy fucks.
The reason why Apple (and Beats, and some other Mfgs) BT earbuds/headphones are superior is not dependent on Bluetooth 5.0; it is because they support a far-superior CODEC, namely AAC, than typical shitbox BT 'phones/'buds.
Mind you, stuff like Apple's W1/W2 chips helps; but the main improvement is due to AAC.
And no, the proprietary aptX is NOT an equivalent. And did I mention "proprietary" (owned by Qualcomm)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
By contrast, AAC is an industry-standard (not Apple-proprietary, as many believe).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Look into it.
Yes I am pissed at these assholes, Sony, Apple, Google and the whole shebang deserve to be roasted for what they do to classical recordings. Sell me pure 24 bit by at least 96 audio files of great well mixed recordings and I will pay but as long as you jackasses 'normalize' and compress the shit out of classical recording I want nothing to do with you and you will not get one more cent out of my pocket period.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Mhmm. Right. One should think of the headphone jack as a simple electrical interface, rather than some sort of magical sound-transport medium.
Well there you are wrong. My audiophile friends and me have done the experiments, and the best sound possible is found when using the small headphone jacks. It lends a vibrancy and a sort of anti-listening fatigue to teh sound. The 1/8th inch phone jack also extends th ehigh and low end of any headphone, an dthe crispness efface due to the smaller spring metal used, can make a 5 dollar headphone bought at Big Lots sound much superior to a stutio headphone, sa a Beyerdynamic. Where after listening to test tones for a hundred straight hours had people tearing the phones off their heads and run screaming out of the room, while the 5 dollar Big Lot's phones and the exquisite 1/8th inch jack and plugs we had to turn off the test tones after two weeks because we were concerned about the wearers starving to death, and they sure didn't smell good by that time.
Audiophile approved as a critical component of anyone who isn't tone deaf.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
aptX-HD is lossless, aptX isn't. Neither Apple nor Google are listed as supporting aptX-HD.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
AptX is better than the current codecs used for Bluetooth but it doesn't give you analog quality.
This argument over audio quality from a cellphone is pretty funny. You folks are all novices. I'm a purist. I have a cellphone I built out of vacuum tubes because nothing beats the audio warmth you get from a vacuum tube amplifier. I power and charge my cellphone using a cable made from deoxygenated 8 gauge copper wires, because the oxygen in normal cables interferes with the highs and the high-current capacity of big wire can power the transient demands of good bass.
If you are someone who uses a cellphone as an audio source while you are sitting in your home theater, then you've admitted you don't care about the sound quality and complaining that it isn't perfection is just silly. You're going to buy the components to do the job right. If you are someone who is using the cellphone like the vast majority of people, to provide distractions from having to deal with other people while you walk or ride the bus or drive in the car, then your listening environment is so full of extraneous sounds that you will never get purity in your sound.
And that's why this whole debate over sound quality is silly. Convenience, yes, argue that, but arguing that the high frequency reproduction from your bluetooth earbud while you're riding the bus is clearly inferior to a wired studio monitor analog headphone with 1/4" TRS connector is, well, wasting a lot of everyone's time.
> And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons.
Does it?
Yes. It absolutely does. Here's my day to day experience with bluetooth.
Get in the car, set the phone down and turn the car audio to bluetooth mode. Fortunately, it's still 'technically' paired so I don't have to re-pair. However, the last device that my car audio was paired with tends to be my husband's phone, so now the audio system flails a bit while trying to figure out how to connect. Even though my Galaxy S reports that the BT audio has connected immediately, the car audio (comes with the 2016 Leaf, so not exactly ancient) says that the device is not connected. So I'll pull over to the side of the road and start fiddling. I'll select my phone from the car's bluetooth menu, it'll pop up a "downloading address book" popup status message. I didn't ask it to do this, there's no option to turn this off. This step naturally never succeeds. I cancel, try again. Same thing. Eventually, it'll just start skipping this step and I'll get a 'connect' button finally. This step usually works.
I'll usually have to kill the youtube process on my phone since Youtube's app is not smart enough to switch to a new bluetooth connection when it happens (when I'm in the car, I'll get a hankering to listen to a specific song I don't have on my phone. I've found Youtube is the best for that). Now, thanks to collisions in instructions between the car and the phone, the audio stream will start, auto-pause, and then start again. At that point, I'll either have gotten into a car accident or arrived at my destination.
My husband told me that the process probably wouldn't be nearly as rough if we weren't switching devices all the time, that the car wouldn't have to flail around reconnecting. But generally he'll connect his phone during the week, and I'll connect mine during the weekend. Maybe it really would be better if there was just one music device per output. I could blame my car audio system, and I certainly do, but the other car audio systems with bluetooth I'd tried were even worse. This being more recent, it actually works better.
It shouldn't be surprising that my husband's iphone works a bit better than my Samsung Galaxy -- of course the cars with the fancy audio systems will be designed for Apple's stuff. But I'm not looking forward to my next car where most likely there won't even be an analog jack, nor do I look forward to the "phones of the future" which will have no audio jack but instead some fucked up sound system that requires more fiddling than analog wires ever did, requires batteries that have to be recharged and will die out and are likely not replaceable, and sound worse than ye olde analog.
But geez, at least it doesn't have wires! Wires are horrible! So horrible that it's worth all these other sound fuckups just to get rid of wires!
but they do mean that dongles are a bit of a pain in the ass.
You're using them wrong! /me hides.