Analysis of the USB-C dongle/headset mess. Bring back the 3.5 mm jack!

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

It may be dumb, but mobile gaming is a bigger market than PC gaming worldwide. More than PC and Console combined.

I bet 75% of that is candy crush and other games like that.

microtransactions and p2w, that's why the amount of money is so high.

[Curufinwe_wins]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Apple followed what several android brands started to do a long time ago.

Next time try reading the text in the link.

Another Note: So far as I can tell from my research, nobody has made a thinner smartphone than the Vivo X5Max yet (4.75mm), and it does have a 3.5mm headphone jack, so there is no such thing as a phone that is “too thin” for a 3.5mm headphone jack - in fact the room to add a headphone jack back to the iPhone 7 is there. (same link just for giggles)

[Enderman]

Just now, NowakVulpix said:

Yes but when did Android phones other than a couple Oppo phones drop the jack? 2017.

There were 4 different brands before apple in that link, if you tried to read it.

[Nowak]

Just now, Enderman said:

There were 4 different brands before apple in that link, if you tried to read it.

I did read it tho

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

I bet 75% of that is candy crush and other games like that.

microtransactions and p2w, that's why the amount of money is so high.

Quite possibly. Doesn't mean the market isn't huge. The install base isn't huge. 

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Another Note: So far as I can tell from my research, nobody has made a thinner smartphone than the Vivo X5Max yet (4.75mm), and it does have a 3.5mm headphone jack, so there is no such thing as a phone that is “too thin” for a 3.5mm headphone jack - in fact the room to add a headphone jack back to the iPhone 7 is there. (same link just for giggles)

There's a thinner phone now, 4.6mm.

Just because the 3.5mm jack is 3.5mm diameter doesn't mean that it can fit in a 3.5mm space.

A jack is not just an empty hole.

 

Anyway, my point is not that they can't fit a jack in, they obviously can, just that for most people it is not necessary.

Few people actually use their phone enough that they need to charge it during the day, and even less that need to charge it while listening to music, and even less that need to charge it while listening to music on high end audiophile headphones/earphones.

 

Get what I mean?

0.1 * 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.001

It's a minority.

[D13H4RD]

Exactly what I have been saying for over a fucking year now. USB-C audio is a massive shitshow. 

 

I had a Moto Z and I still have its dongle. Doesn't work at all with my Note8. Same for the Xiaomi adapter and even the one supplied with the Huawei P20 Pro. 

 

It annoys me to no end because so many people have told me that "Durr, we need to kill off the headphone jack because muh progress", but I've been keeping track on new headphones and I have yet to see significant progress in that arena.

 

There are a few more wireless options but not one that's extremely high end. Many of these headphones also still use Bluetooth 4.2, when BT 5 has already been out since the Galaxy S8. Not to mention that I have yet to see a new wireless standard that is able to handle ultra high bitrate audio (aside from the LDAC codec that I use on my 1000XM2). 

 

USB-C is STILL an absolute clusterball and there are barely any GOOD high-end USB-C options. The only one that I know of is the just-launched Sony 1000XM3 but there's no indication that it uses USB-C audio. 

 

So, no. As of now, this isn't for progress, no matter what Apple says. Yes, they have good stuff but the cynic in me feels that this is a tactic to make the AirPods more appealing. At least Apple made sure that Lightning accessories would work at least most of the time. Trying USB-C accessories is like playing Russian Roulette at times. I tried the cable my mother uses for her Huawei Honor 8 Pro and it legit wouldn't charge my Note8. 

[Bouzoo]

7 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

Just transfer data over the network or use an internet service. Theres just no reason to use a usb anymore for the average user. You can even bootcamp without a usb.

Because that's what an average joe uses? Really? Joe won't use usb but an online service? Your Joe is way too techy to be average. He will still use usb, much more often than an online service. 

[D13H4RD]

You know what else I find horrifically ironic? 

 

Google's own Pixel phones have no headphone jack but the USB audio spec on Android is still at USB Audio Class v1.0 ever since Android Lollipop 

 

The current version is v3.0

[Curufinwe_wins]

7 minutes ago, Enderman said:

There's a thinner phone now, 4.6mm.

Just because the 3.5mm jack is 3.5mm diameter doesn't mean that it can fit in a 3.5mm space.

A jack is not just an empty hole.

 

Anyway, my point is not that they can't fit a jack in, they obviously can, just that for most people it is not necessary.

Few people actually use their phone enough that they need to charge it during the day, and even less that need to charge it while listening to music, and even less that need to charge it while listening to music on high end audiophile headphones/earphones.

 

Get what I mean?

0.1 * 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.001

It's a minority.

On the contrary. Few people know how to use their phones such that they don't have to charge during the day. My father for example, refuses to close apps or turn the screen off when he is done with them, and thus literally gets 7 hours shorter battery life than I do using the same device. 

 

 

Quote

According to the LG poll, 86 per cent of people charge their battery 1-3 times during the day, and 80 per cent will charge their phone before leaving the house, regardless of whether they need to or not. Twenty-eight per cent of people even keep their phone plugged into a charger all day long.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-were-all-obsessed-with-keeping-our-phones-charged-20170210-gu9q0j.html

[D13H4RD]

I know I have mentioned this a ton over the past few days but rumor has it that the new iPad Pro will ditch the jack. 

 

That makes me mad. Big ass tablet with somehow no space for an audio jack... 

[leadeater]

48 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Twenty-eight per cent of people even keep their phone plugged into a charger all day long.

...... mobile phone... plugged in all day.... LOL.

[Carclis]

Lets move to USB-C in order to reduce the profile of phones even further, but force users to buy and carry around bulky USB-C to audio dongles all day.

I guess the other smartphone manufacturers started employing Apples' Geniuses.

[suicidalfranco]

>looks at own LG V10

>laughs in HD660s

>cries while looking at current line up of LG devices

[D13H4RD]

3 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

>looks at own LG V10

>laughs in HD660s

>cries while looking at current line up of LG devices

>looks at Note8

>laughs at the ability to use wired and wireless headphones without issue

>cries while looking at other phones

 

18 minutes ago, Carclis said:

Lets move to USB-C in order to reduce the profile of phones even further, but force users to buy and carry around bulky USB-C to audio dongles all day.

Irony is that the port that's supposed to be universal ended up being a clusterball

[DrMacintosh]

I mean I know its about USB C, but Apple had it figured out from day 1 when they decided to move to Lighting Audio/Wireless audio

[Carclis]

11 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Irony is that the port that's supposed to be universal ended up being a clusterball

I guess that's what happens when the motivation behind its implementation is different to the reasoning given.

[D13H4RD]

7 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I mean I know its about USB C, but Apple had it figured out from day 1 when they decided to move to Lighting Audio/Wireless audio

Eh, Lightning doesn't have the same degree of compatibility clusterfucks that USB-C has

 

Mostly because it's Apple-only

[Carclis]

2 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Eh, Lightning doesn't have the same degree of compatibility clusterfucks that USB-C has

 

Mostly because it's Apple-only

That's the irony. They're trying to be like Apple but because they're not people expect incompatibility issues to be non-existent and standards to be adhered to.

[D13H4RD]

3 minutes ago, Carclis said:

That's the irony. They're trying to be like Apple but because they're not people expect incompatibility issues to be non-existent and standards to be adhered to.

The other irony is that Apple has a proprietary chip that helps alleviate some of the downsides of wireless *anything*.

 

To date, I have never seen any other phone manufacturer try to combat this issue. It seems like people are killing it off just to follow Apple, when they themselves haven't done anything to make wireless audio evolve significantly from where we used to be. At least Sony's 1000XM3 has an upgraded chip with a better DAC.

 

But it's still Bluetooth v4.2 Yes, it works fine but BT v5 has been out for 1.5 years now with improvements to audio and Android still uses USB Audio Class v1, and not v3.

 

It's painfully ironic how Android OEMs are so keen to remove the jack but make no improvement in the actual implementation.

[Sniperfox47]

7 hours ago, Drak3 said:

If a phone had ANY speakers (hint: literally every single phone in the planet does), they must have a DAC to use saud speaker(s).

 

The only space theoretically saved would be the jack itself. But as we've seen with every phone that lacks the jack so far, that space saving technique is just wasted.

A lot of phones use the DAC built into your SoC for the speakers (and possibly the headphones). 

 

It also saves space for the traces inside the phone as well as isolation for those traces with them carrying an analogue signal.

 

3 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

The phone always will have speakers and microphones.  Thus they will always need a dac. So the real question is why the F would you ever move away from utilizing the far better DAC inside the phone to an ultraminimized POS on a dongle.

 

"Courage"

I'm not sure where you get that the DAC I the dongle is more "ultraminimized" than on the phone. *Most* phones use a DAC built directly into the SoC of the phone. You can't get more "ultraminimized" than that.

 

There's plenty of dongles out there there with really good DACs in them. I have one that I use with a Sabre es9018k2m DAC/AMP in it that sounds fantastic. You don't need a huge DAC to sound *substantially* better than most phones. Not to mention having more isolation from the electrical noise from the rest of the CPU.

 

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Are you intentionally failing to understand that the USB-C port has a standard spec for outputing Analog audio. If this was forced to be complied with... all the passive adapters would work with every phone.

 

The digital variant is taking normal USB data, and doing the same exact thing as a sound card in making that into analog audio. Unless the dongle is explicitly intelligent to only allow device ID's that are the ones it expects to be plugged in (IE whitelisting specific products), it will work on every usb-c device already. You take a usb audio dac plug it into a computer, you don't have to worry about the manufacturer of the computer because that isn't how it works. It just takes the digital standard signal and converts it in the dongle. Nothing fancy at all.

I don't understand why you think that analogue option has any merit? It completely defeats most of the point of moving audio to the USB-C port in the first place. You still need all the space inside your device for running audio lines. You still need space inside your device for isolation for those lines.

 

And how do you want it handled on laptops? You can't just hook it up to every port on a laptop...

 

And none of that is to mention that the USB-C Digital Audio standard specifically forbids devices from supporting Audio Accessory mode because of compatibility so you're still going to have two different classes of devices, one that works with everything and one that doesn't.

 

42 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

Charging while listening to music and also being able to use the same pair of headphones across all your devices instead of just one? USB-C isn't widely adopted outside of mobile yet, my guy.

There's absolutely nothing stopping digital USB-C headphones from having passthrough charging. In fact Mophie has a dongle that has a 3.5mm Jack and supports full USB PD charging of the host device.

 

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

If your phone's battery has degraded like mine, charging multiple times a day is necessary. Especially when doing something that uses the CPU more, like listening to music. So yes, I have done this "charge while listening to music" thing before.

With any modernish phone you shouldn't be having any kind of significant CPU activity from playing music. Local music Should be handled mostly by fixed hardware in your Media Decoder and DAC, and for streamed music you just add the tiny bit of CPU overhead for the network management. The network radios should use far more battery than the CPU itself.

 

 Hell if you have a mid-range phone from the past 2 years your device should be able to enter a full-on doze state without interrupting music playback, no CPU wakelocks or anything.

 

But again USB-C headphones can support passthrough power, or you can use a hub that has passthrough power. Or a dongle that has passthrough power.

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

My motherboard has USB-C but only one port and I'm using it for my keyboard so it's already used

My case is from 2014 and does not have USB-C

Fair but both of those concerns will be resolved as adoption of USB-C increases. Most devices just had 1 USB-A 3.0 port until just recently as well.

 

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

My Switch has USB-C but it doesn't carry audio over USB-C

That is completely false. The switch supports any USB Audio Class 1 or 3 device, and any USB Audio Class 2 device that supports fallback (since it was optional for AC2 but mandatory for AC3).

 

I've personally been using my Sabre 9018 based dongle and Aero-C headphones with my switch due to their much better audio quality and it's been largely without issue. Any of the USB-C Digital Audio compliant dongles (like Google's and Mophie's) will work fine with the switch.

 

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

My laptop has USB-C but it also has a perfectly good 3.5mm combo jack

My phone has USB-C but I need that for charging

Again there are dongles and headphones that support passthrough charging that solves this issue.

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

Meanwhile, I can use the same 3.5mm headphones across all of these devices. Without adapters. Bliss.

And that's only true because of the painful transition period where people needed adapters between 3.5mm, 2.5mm, and 6.3mm and various proprietary standards until the industry stablized on a single standard.

 

USB-C Digital Audio adapters and headphones will work with all the devices you just mentioned as well. It's still a growing market segments but don't expect it to disappear.

 

 

29 minutes ago, NowakVulpix said:

Don't think for a second that Apple ditching the 3.5mm jack (and Android OEMs following suit) was to benefit us. It was so Apple could sell AirPods and Beats headphones, and also to work around loopholes with the 3.5mm jack. The adapter is just for people who aren't ready to buy into their expensive wireless ecosystem they'd rather you use. The mobile industry doesn't decide the fate of the jack anyway; that's up to the audio industry, and they aren't keen on ditching a universal standard.

I'm not sure what you're talking about... Various Android manufacturers ditched the jack before Apple, this isn't an Apple thing. Nobody's been quiet about the fact that ditching the jack isn't to help consumers. It's to free more space inside the device and lower development complexity as well as allowing them to cram more things in.

 

You're absolutely right that digital and analogue audio are going to exist side by side, neither one is going anywhere anytime soon. And you'll likely have the option of devices that still have the jack. Just don't be surprised if cheaper devices or those with more features are lacking it.

[Nowak]

3 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Just don't be surprised if cheaper devices or those with more features are lacking it.

idk man, mid-ranged phones now have more ports than high-end ones ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Carclis]

4 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

The other irony is that Apple has a proprietary chip that helps alleviate some of the downsides of wireless *anything*.

 

To date, I have never seen any other phone manufacturer try to combat this issue. It seems like people are killing it off just to follow Apple, when they themselves haven't done anything to make wireless audio evolve significantly from where we used to be. At least Sony's 1000XM3 has an upgraded chip with a better DAC.

 

But it's still Bluetooth v4.2 Yes, it works fine but BT v5 has been out for 1.5 years now with improvements to audio and Android still uses USB Audio Class v1, and not v3.

 

It's painfully ironic how Android OEMs are so keen to remove the jack but make no improvement in the actual implementation.

Well I think the wireless headphones subject is a whole other issue or another way to sell proprietary devices which brings with it a whole other set of problems. Namely compatibility, durability, battery life concerns, interference, audio quality, earbud size and issues regarding how easy they are to lose. I'm not saying the wireless versions Apple offer are bad but they seem like a bit of a niche which exists to solve a problem they created whilst not offering anything new over existing wired versions.

[DrMacintosh]

36 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

The other irony is that Apple has a proprietary chip that helps alleviate some of the downsides of wireless *anything*.

 

To date, I have never seen any other phone manufacturer try to combat this issue. It seems like people are killing it off just to follow Apple, when they themselves haven't done anything to make wireless audio evolve significantly from where we used to be. At least Sony's 1000XM3 has an upgraded chip with a better DAC.

 

But it's still Bluetooth v4.2 Yes, it works fine but BT v5 has been out for 1.5 years now with improvements to audio and Android still uses USB Audio Class v1, and not v3.

 

It's painfully ironic how Android OEMs are so keen to remove the jack but make no improvement in the actual implementation.

This just calls back to this video

 

OEMs want to be more like Apple but take none of the steps that keep people coming back to Apple products. The end result is something that is, on the surface, similar to an Apple bevice, but in practice is usually much worse for some technical reason that isn’t immediately apparent. 

[asus killer]

people don't realize the simplest of things. It's in their hands to have or not the 3.5 jack, the consumer has all the power.