Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by emsy 3062 days ago
In reality those constraints don't have any humanly discernable impact on the quality. Plus the part about the lightning protocol makes no sense whatsoever.

Here's an idea: Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter and which one isn't. I bet you won't hear the difference.
2 comments
snvzz 3062 days ago
The real issue is the extra item to carry and plug.

Headphones -> headphone jack in device is sensible. A dongle isn't.

link
emsy 3062 days ago
I have an iPhone 7. In reality even that isn't an issue. You can keep the dongle attached to your headphones and it will stick safely to it.

I would really like to know how many people who find issue with the dongle have day-to-day experience with a headphone jack-less device. My bigger concern is that headphone jacks will vanish from headphones.

link
solarkraft 3062 days ago
Because I have broken all my headphones and then my phone's audio jack I am trying out the dongly life. So far it hasn't been that bad, but I suspect that there will be situations in which I'll want to charge and have an audio device connected.
link
emsy 3061 days ago
I dislike Apples love for dongles, but the headphone donglegate is mainly a constructed problem by people that just want to rage about something. Sure, it sucks that you can't use your headphones while charging but in reality I had this problem exactly once in a year of usage. There are actual problems with modern smartphones and iPhones in particular but the headphone jack is a ridiculously propped up issue.
link
raverbashing 3062 days ago
> Plus the part about the lightning protocol makes no sense whatsoever.

Yes it does, unless the port has an analog audio channel

It's extra hardware that has to be on the dongle (at the expense of everything else) - for Audio I'm gessing it's USB https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/syst...

> Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter

Would be an interesting test, I would begin by checking the max volume allowed

link
solarkraft 3062 days ago
> Yes it does, unless the port has an analog audio channel

Then you'd have an internal DAC. Apple is extremely greedy with space, but a DAC/amp isn't large. The dongle has more available space. The sound is digital before being converted either way, the "lighting protocol" won't hurt the quality unless they lossily compress, which I doubt.

link