Change my mind: 3.5mm jacks

[Helpful Tech Witch]

2 hours ago, Caroline said:

phone?

Is that not the issue of the thread? 3.5mm being removed from phones?

[Arika]

why would you want less options? 

I would rather use my wired earbuds than wireless for the multitude of reasons already mentioned.

what have manufacturers done with al this extra space they "saved" by not including the headphone jack? 

[birdhuman]

16 hours ago, teknohpile said:

Never really understood LMG raging at not having a headphone jack. OK your opinion is valid, but is it really worth actually getting that mad about? I'm actually more likely to get triggered when my wired headphones get ripped off my head as they frequently do.

My opinion is they are only necessary on audiophile devices and budget devices. 
 

to me, it's a "must have" feature. without it, I'll change to another option until no phone in the market then repair the existing ones.

[8tg]

Personally I don’t care because these things exist:

And they’re better than the onboard audio of most phones, and there’s a ton of variety depending on what you want to do, and they’re not even expensive.

 

The stock apple dongle for lightning to 3.5mm is technically a better dac/amp than the 3.5mm output on the last iPod touch.

 

Other notes as points made in here

-Bluetooth sucks and has a massive data bandwidth limitation still that isn’t good enough for higher resolution formats 

-Bluetooth devices have a finite lifespan unless you can repeatedly replace batteries and in the case of Bluetooth earbuds that’s extremely difficult

-wired earbuds or headphones do not have that problem, many options in all price brackets have easily replaceable cables 

If you’re buying $200-$300 wireless earbuds you’re spending a lot of money for not a lot of audio quality, a terrible microphone, and they’ll only last a few years before the battery is cooked. All at the benefit of just not having a wire.

Its your money, spend it how you want, I just see it as ewaste made for a minor convenience.

Versus going the other way around and sacrificing the lack of a wire by buying $200-$300 wired headphones or earbuds and getting audio quality which is way better, a usable microphone that doesn’t sound like the audio equivalent of a dumpster fire, not having to charge them, and them not being completely useless after a few years and ending up in a landfill.

I take that back, spend $60-$100 on wired earbuds and get all of those benefits shitting all over $200-$300 wireless earbuds.

Because Bluetooth audio is exactly that much of a compromise.

 

Now I say this as someone with a lot of fairly high end audio gear so I am biased. But even just as a general consumer, why on earth would you weigh those pros and cons and decide that buying something that is vastly inferior in every regard except one compared to the other, and will be useless in a finite time span, was the superior choice?

 

But back to the main thing, no the lack of 3.5mm doesn’t matter because 3.5mm dongles are fine. Yeah sure you lose out on charging while listening to music but god damn put your phone down then and go touch grass.

[mr moose]

My situation may or may not be rare, but often at parties (when I do the sound) people have a playlist on their phone they want run through the system. I do not have BT on my mixer (it is a professional mixer not a chinese ebay hobby machine), therefore their phone has to have a 3.5 or some way to get sound out outside of BT.  I could add a BT receiver to my setup, I have often though about it, but then the playback would be interrupted every time that person got got a txt, email, call or some other app notification.   I am sure they could turn all that off, or set it to airplane mode, however turning it all off is a pain in the ass and airplane mode stops the BT from working so is a moot option.  Also I am there as a sound engineer, not a tech advisor for random MILF's with iphones and no morals. 

 

I figure this situation is probably more common than not with the number of "party boxes" out there.

[jaslion]

13 hours ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

It’s really easy for a cable to get caught on something if your using them while walking

especially if your phone is in your pocket and you’re using wired earbuds

Walking too close to a table with will make it quite easy to catch the cable on the corner and rip them out of your ears.

 

 

 

I mean there is the ancient hidden technique for that

 

Tuck the cable under your shirt no juistu

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

2 hours ago, 8tg said:

Personally I don’t care because these things exist:

And they’re better than the onboard audio of most phones, and there’s a ton of variety depending on what you want to do, and they’re not even expensive.

 

The stock apple dongle for lightning to 3.5mm is technically a better dac/amp than the 3.5mm output on the last iPod touch.

 

Other notes as points made in here

-Bluetooth sucks and has a massive data bandwidth limitation still that isn’t good enough for higher resolution formats 

-Bluetooth devices have a finite lifespan unless you can repeatedly replace batteries and in the case of Bluetooth earbuds that’s extremely difficult

-wired earbuds or headphones do not have that problem, many options in all price brackets have easily replaceable cables 

If you’re buying $200-$300 wireless earbuds you’re spending a lot of money for not a lot of audio quality, a terrible microphone, and they’ll only last a few years before the battery is cooked. All at the benefit of just not having a wire.

Its your money, spend it how you want, I just see it as ewaste made for a minor convenience.

Versus going the other way around and sacrificing the lack of a wire by buying $200-$300 wired headphones or earbuds and getting audio quality which is way better, a usable microphone that doesn’t sound like the audio equivalent of a dumpster fire, not having to charge them, and them not being completely useless after a few years and ending up in a landfill.

I take that back, spend $60-$100 on wired earbuds and get all of those benefits shitting all over $200-$300 wireless earbuds.

Because Bluetooth audio is exactly that much of a compromise.

 

Now I say this as someone with a lot of fairly high end audio gear so I am biased. But even just as a general consumer, why on earth would you weigh those pros and cons and decide that buying something that is vastly inferior in every regard except one compared to the other, and will be useless in a finite time span, was the superior choice?

 

But back to the main thing, no the lack of 3.5mm doesn’t matter because 3.5mm dongles are fine. Yeah sure you lose out on charging while listening to music but god damn put your phone down then and go touch grass.

Better than onboard audio by which metric? To be quite blunt, most enthusiast dongle audio DACs are complete meaningless bullshit, but this counts for most of the audiophile gear. What they're proposing is certifiably insane from my point of view as an analog circuit designer. The audiophool guys continuously claim to be able to outperform the thermal noise floor, so I can only assume they're using liquid helium cooling or figured out a way to compensate for quantum physical processes. I wish I had their top secret technology back when I was designing amplifier for medical scanners, would have made my life so much easier. Wouldn't have had to source exotic GaAs transistors and spend months getting the noise figure down to something acceptable so we could get a good scan of fluid movement in someone's body. And that doesn't even get into the entire issue of the dongles being physically too small to implement a proper DC-blocking output filter. But I digress, I fear I'm going a bit off topic here.

 

Why are you advertising dongles anyway? Could just make the phone half a millimetre thicker so they have space for the 3.5 mm audio jack again. Avoids needing another dongle, you won't have issues with lint-clogged usb-c ports, uses significantly less power, the audio quality on modern devices is fine (this ain't a Nokia 5510 from the early 2000s), etc.

 

But I agree, bluetooth audio sucks, you can usually only have a limited number of bluetooth connections, meaning that you might have to disconnect other devices, the available bandwidth is spotty at best, especially if there are a lot of other users nearby. And you need an additional charger and cable on you to charge these things.

[wasab]

10 years from now, this question would sound like today's "convince me why I shouldn't be outrage that pc no longer supports floppy drive"

[Sarra]

I've literally decided not to purchase laptops because they don't have 3.5mm jacks.

 

In fact, I literally was about to delete the Steam Deck reservation from my checkout, until I saw the 3.5mm jack, and then mashed my face on the 'pay now' button.

 

That said, I was forced to get wireless headphones for work. My last phone, a Galaxy S10+, finally got replaced with a new phone, a Z Fold 3, and I didn't want to lug around my $200 headphones at work.

 

Wireless headphones work well enough with mobile. The Microsoft Windows bluetooth drivers are literally flaming heaps of garbage. They are just so, so bad, and they have been like this since I think Windows 8.1, or even longer, but they just stay the same. I have no confidence that Microsoft will ever improve them, so my wireless IEM's will never be used with a Windows device.

 

That said, I shocked myself by pairing them with my Steam Deck, and wow, Linux has better BT imlementation than Windows, and the silly earbuds are usable with my Deck. I still use the 3.5mm jack, when it's docked, that is how I run my audio into my mixer and headphones.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

5 minutes ago, wasab said:

10 years from now, this question would sound like today's "convince me why I shouldn't be outrage that pc no longer supports floppy drive"

That's an entirely different issue, there's plenty of options for storage mediums, and usually multiple ports through which you can connect. Meanwhile, for audio there's no real alternative at the moment, and before you claim USB-C, you lose the ability to charge simultaneously, it requires specific software support, etc.

 

1 minute ago, Sarra said:

I've literally decided not to purchase laptops because they don't have 3.5mm jacks.

I paid €600 extra to have a physical ethernet port.

[Holmes108]

4 minutes ago, wasab said:

10 years from now, this question would sound like today's "convince me why it is better my pc supports floppy drive"

 

Likely, but it'll only be because wireless tech will be much much better by then. (and I say this as a current heavy blue tooth user).

[Sarra]

3 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

I paid €600 extra to have a physical ethernet port.

I just spend $500 for 10GBE, and I can't even install the cards in my computers due to no PCIE slots being open (or existing).

[Holmes108]

4 minutes ago, Sarra said:

I've literally decided not to purchase laptops because they don't have 3.5mm jacks.

 

In fact, I literally was about to delete the Steam Deck reservation from my checkout, until I saw the 3.5mm jack, and then mashed my face on the 'pay now' button.

 

That said, I was forced to get wireless headphones for work. My last phone, a Galaxy S10+, finally got replaced with a new phone, a Z Fold 3, and I didn't want to lug around my $200 headphones at work.

 

Wireless headphones work well enough with mobile. The Microsoft Windows bluetooth drivers are literally flaming heaps of garbage. They are just so, so bad, and they have been like this since I think Windows 8.1, or even longer, but they just stay the same. I have no confidence that Microsoft will ever improve them, so my wireless IEM's will never be used with a Windows device.

 

That said, I shocked myself by pairing them with my Steam Deck, and wow, Linux has better BT imlementation than Windows, and the silly earbuds are usable with my Deck. I still use the 3.5mm jack, when it's docked, that is how I run my audio into my mixer and headphones.

 

Yep, BT used to be a little sketchy all around. But over the last number of years, I've found it imrpoved dramatically for mobile. My phone, and my car have almost zero issues connecting, leaving and reconnecting, quality, etc... 

 

But windows is rough. Especially if you want to use a BT headset and try and use it for game sound, background music, and a chat app like Discord etc? Forget about it. It's a headache.

[Sarra]

22 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

 

Yep, BT used to be a little sketchy all around. But over the last number of years, I've found it imrpoved dramatically for mobile. My phone, and my car have almost zero issues connecting, leaving and reconnecting, quality, etc... 

 

But windows is rough. Especially if you want to use a BT headset and try and use it for game sound, background music, and a chat app like Discord etc? Forget about it. It's a headache.

I got so frustrated just trying to listen to music on some BT headphones, the driver was literally unusable. Windows would force the headphones into 'call mode', and drop the quality to basically 1970's landline levels, then it would break and refuse to let me change it. I literally threw a BT adapter and BT headset away, it was so bad.

[Vishera]

17 hours ago, Caroline said:

phone?

Some people use their smartphones as MP3 players.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Some people use their smartphones as MP3 players.

Who doesn't? Most modern smartphones have plenty of storage and barely use battery playing back WAV, MP3, OOG or AAC since it's often supported at hardware level.

[igormp]

18 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

Who doesn't? Most modern smartphones have plenty of storage and barely use battery playing back WAV, MP3, OOG or AAC since it's often supported at hardware level.

People also like to use streaming services. I only listen to music through spotify, be it on my phone or desktop.

[wasab]

3 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

Meanwhile, for audio there's no real alternative at the moment, and before you claim USB-C, you lose the ability to charge simultaneously, it requires specific software support, etc

having more ports and wires is a con on its own in my opinion. i definitly would not want a wire headphone while runing and lifting at the gym. 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

29 minutes ago, igormp said:

People also like to use streaming services. I only listen to music through spotify, be it on my phone or desktop.

Yes, but I meant more along the lines of "who still buys a MP3 player?"

9 minutes ago, wasab said:

having more ports and wires is a con on its own in my opinion. i definitly would not want a wire headphone while runing and lifting at the gym. 

How is having more ports a negative thing? You don't have to use it, no one is saying they should remove bluetooth. The reality is that the 3.5 mm connector is nearly 70 years old, it's barely any thicker than a USB-C connector (about 0.5 mm), and it enables compatibility with virtually any audio device in existence made in the last half century. So from my point of view you are actively vouching and arguing against reliable and efficient connectivity that costs mere cents to implement. There's no good reason to eliminate the 3.5 mm jack other than the ridiculous race for thinness.

[dcgreen2k]

I love my 3.5mm headphone jack. I don't have to worry about connection issues or forgetting to charge my headphones, and I'm always sitting down when I use my laptop so mobility isn't an issue. None of my devices that use it have ever broken at the cord or jack; it's always adhesives inside the headphones or earbuds that go first. The 3.5mm is a proven connector and I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon.

[ewitte]

I'm not attached to any time of standard just that I like

- Dedicated ports as discussed above.

- Wired.  I'm not a huge wireless fan I hate latency and the quality isn't as good.

[igormp]

43 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Ew.

Double ew.

Ok boomer.

 

/s

[wasab]

2 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

How is having more ports a negative thing? You don't have to use it, no one is saying they should remove bluetooth. The reality is that the 3.5 mm connector is nearly 70 years old, it's barely any thicker than a USB-C connector (about 0.5 mm), and it enables compatibility with virtually any audio device in existence made in the last half century. So from my point of view you are actively vouching and arguing against reliable and efficient connectivity that costs mere cents to implement. There's no good reason to eliminate the 3.5 mm jack other than the ridiculous race for thinness.

i cant count the number of times my wire got caught or tangle in something which flings my phone out of my pocket and then crashing it into the hard pavement. i dont want to shorten my phone's life span by introducing an uneccesary hazard. If the phone does not fly away, it is my earbuds falling out of my ears. very big annoyance. 

[Holmes108]

1 minute ago, wasab said:

i cant count the number of times my wire got caught or tangle in something which flings my phone out of my pocket and then crashing it into the hard pavement. i dont want to shorten my phone's life span by introducing an uneccesary hazard. 

 

That's the great thing about choice. You don't have to!

[wasab]

3 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

 

That's the great thing about choice. You don't have to!

right, except including the headphone jack IS an opportunity costs. it leaves out space for other parts of the component, bigger battery for example. I say the same about phone front facing cameras. i dont use it at all and would love to have a phone that does not sacrfice its screen real estate for a selfie camera.