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by jesseschalken 2833 days ago
The headphone jack is one of the last remaining analog connections in consumer electronics and its death is long overdue.
2 comments

Speakers are purely analog devices. The work on digital speakers has begun a century ago in 1920 and still hasn't yielded any usable consumer products. Moving the digital to analog converter into the speaker doesn't change anything. We will have analog speakers for at least another century.

Now if you were talking purely about the connector itself. Whatever wireless technology was forced upon the population is not actually capable of replacing a wired connection.

* Bluetooth doesn't work in crowded environments. * Standard Bluetooth sound quality is inferior without proprietary extensions to the protocol. * Latency between device and headphone can be massive (500ms to 100ms), * You have to recharge it. * Devices have to be paired and sometimes "unpair" for no reason.

Bluetooth just sucks for audio. I'm sure there are hundreds of wireless technologies that are better than bluetooth, otherwise these proprietary extensions wouldn't exist.

You can in theory get <32ms latency with a special obscure subvariant of a proprietary standard of bluetooth (aka aptX LL) that no one has ever heard of for which you need a certain dongle and your headphone must support it. (hint your phone and headphones don't support it)

Planning on getting your ears replace with a digital implant as well?
I'm putting it off as long as I can; everything I hear is that a properly working set of factory equipment works better than a cochlear implant.

Still, several of the older people in my life have gotten them, and they were a huge improvement for those people.