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Comment by moskie | Hacker News Reader

It's recently occurred to me that the prolificness of the 3.5mm audio connector is something to revere. Wikipedia tells that it's been around since 1964, with its fame really coming with the Walkman in 1979. So, a connector introduced over fifty years ago is still in wide use today. How is that even possible? RJ11 phone jacks I think were introduced around the same time, but they seem archaic and old-fashioned in a way the 3.5mm audio jack doesn't. It just astonishes me that the audio connector has been a solved problem for this long, and with all the other advances in tech we've seen.... audio connectors didn't need any improvements.

It makes me very skeptical of any replacements. If a fifty year old connector has been essentially flawless all this time, it's gonna be a tough sell to convince me that something else is really needed now.

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How is that even possible?

Only the computer industry has rapid obsolescence. Other standards aren't nearly so vulnerable to churn. Look at your power sockets. Or your pipe fittings, nuts, bolts, and so on.

Tell that to my dad, who worked as a plumber back in the days of copper pipes etc. These days it is all plastic, so he had to go out of his way to get tools and parts the last time they did anything to their home.

Said home also still have a bunch of ungrounded sockets, because back then regulations didn't require it outside of the kitchen or some such.

> These days it is all plastic, so he had to go out of his way to get tools and parts the last time they did anything to their home.

The main difference between plumbing and other de-facto standards like the mini jack is that plastic components offer some important advantages over the metallic ones, such as price.

It's only natural that obsolete standards are replaced by newer standards when the newer versions offer important improvements.

Isn't that the same with computers? They introduce new connectors to overcome limitations in the old ones. Moore's law is the reason for this I assume.

The article talks about the possible improvements: "USB Type-C Digital Audio".

Moving the DAC and amplifier out of the noise electric environment of a device and closer to the headphone can improve the sound quality. Of course this makes the headphone more expensive but its an improvement in quality for most users. Two examples:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/z-ero-the-world-s-1st-dig...

http://www.sony.com/electronics/headband-headphones/mdr-1ada...

Plug sockets are about the only thing in my flat which aren't based on obsolete standards - general consensus is that the blocks were lashed up by cowboys. Which makes it a right bugger when you want to replace a bathroom tile (can't - they stopped making that size about 25 years ago); replace the oven (no-one makes them that narrow any more); replace the toilet (cistern is in another room); etc. etc.

Someone should start if there's that much demand. Good way to make some money.

> How is that even possible? RJ11 phone jacks I think were introduced around the same time, but they seem archaic and old-fashioned in a way the 3.5mm audio jack doesn't.

There hasn't been a major change in the amount of bandwidth or function for headphones.

RJ11 was, and still is, a perfectly fine standard if all you need is two or four wires. But that wasn't enough to meet the requirements for hundreds or thousands of megabits of data.

The bandwidth of the human ear hasn't improved, and over short distances the analog transmission of headphones isn't usually a problem.

The only thing we've added to headphones in the recent years are a limited number of playback control buttons and a microphone, which have evolved the port only a little bit.

An interesting piece about the 3.5mm audio connector from the BBC:

The 19th Century plug that's still being used

"The 3.5mm headphone jack is essentially a 19th Century bit of kit - it is a miniaturised version of the classic quarter-inch jack (6.35mm), which is said to go back as far as 1878."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35253398

I still remember watching WW2 films and seeing scenes of phone exchanges where people were switching manually ussing the quarter inch jack. It was surprisingly thrilling. I was working during the day at a place where I sold the same type of jack that was in use for similar purposes all the way back in world war 2.

I had no idea their history went back so much further than that.

I have a bunch of old electronics parts inherited from my father, who was a Ham and an EE. There are a few old quarter-inch phone plugs, from the 30s or 40s, in the collection, with classic Bakelite casings. They work just fine in modern equipment.

The basic design may still be around, but if you compare the original with one that is used today on modern devices, you will find it divided into may more bands.

This because originally you had mono. Meaning you only needed two wires.

Then came stereo, but you could get away with using three wires.

So with the plug end being designated ground, they divided the upper band in two.

then comes phones and the idea of putting a remote on the headphones wire. "Simple", divide the bands again giving a total of 4.

Thus when you plug it in, you have ground down at the bottom, and then some arbitrary divide of left, right, and remote.

The old Cannon/Amphenol connectors are still my favorite, and they supposedly go back to the 30s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-DTL-5015

Have you ever had to assemble one of those things? Ugh. T_T

Yes! I've assembled probably 100 17 pin ones.

The humble XLR is a much, much better connector ( it locks, it's possibly gas-tight and it has lots of surface area ) , but it wasn't exactly going to fit on a Walk, was it?

Plus, you can actually solder an XLR.

You can definitely solder headphone jack connectors...

How I know this: I've done it at least three times.

But on a decent quality XLR, you can re-solder 20 times, drive a truck over, yank on it until the cable snaps, ... and it will still work beautifully ;-).

Judging from some of cables I've seen, that's also the use that most XLR connectors are exposed to.

> But on a decent quality XLR, you can re-solder 20 times, drive a truck over, yank on it until the cable snaps, ... and it will still work beautifully ;-).

Same for a humble headphone jack, if we're dealing with one which has been designed with that purpose in mind. Just unscrew the metallic cap, unsolder the cables, solder them again, you're good to go.

The XLR's robustness may actually be a problem. When an accident occurs, it's better to just break the 10€ cable than the 1k€ equipment it's connected to.

Indeed. You haven't really worked stage until you've accidentally yanked a cable that's still connected to something on the other end.

There is mini XLR, which should easily fit on a Walk...

That's true. I've only seen pictures of those.

I have one on my headphones

AKGs by any chance?

Indeed :)

I'm sad the K812s moved to a proprietary connector. I have a stash of mini-xlr's

That's not a standard, though. AKG and other companies have different "mini XLR" connectors and they vary by pin number (3 or 4) and pin mapping.

> If a fifty year old connector has been essentially flawless all this time

3.5mm jacks are honestly not that great. Not enough surface area and all the important contacts on the plug are exposed and subject to corrosion and abrasion. It has lasted because it's good enough, not because it's flawless.

Not to mention that it shorts itself out on every plug/unplug. There's a reason this style of connector never took off for any other application.

About the only two things i could see that might need changes for it, are longevity of the connector (make it last more insertions) and maybe making it thinner for devices that don't seem to want battery life in favor of being thinner/lighter.

Even then it'll still be a really hard sell because they've been improving the longevity for a half-century and it'll be hard for something else to come up to that kind of ease and reliability.

I would love a standard that doesn't produce a loud pop when you plug it in to amplified speakers.

I don't know if that can be done. There's going to be two causes to that, capacitance in the line you're plugging in or there being a DC offset from the device. The amplifier should filter out both of those in the long term pretty easily with some capacitive coupling. However that will lead to a sharp peak when you plug it in, that makes the speakers pop.

You might be able to require a sense line however, and then the amplifier can keep a timed relay on the plug before it actually starts amplifying the signal.

My understanding is that 1/8" has this problem because it mates signal connections before ground, which is why its less common in RCA or XLR connections that mate ground at the same time or before signal.

Also, a digital interconnect will not inherently have this problem.

Let's lift a glass to Edison base light bulbs, eh?

Edison bulbs are awful. The BNC style ones much of the rest of the world uses are vastly superior.

RJ11 has never seemed archaic to me - I've always treated it as just a smaller RJ45, and it still works fine for a lot of uses (phone landlines, ADSL broadband etc.)

How is that even possible?

Take a look at the MIDI connector. It has been around for 30+ years, also, and is still .. ubiquitous!

The answer is, in my opinion, simple: the hardware is still there. Its still quite useful. Connections are forever!

It's because of Moore's law. Power consumption decreases, size decreases, and of course throughput increases as well. When that happens, connectors must change.

I think it needs to die and be replaced by a standard wireless audio technology of some sort, more efficient than bluetooth. I honestly don't know how people can go about their daily commutes with cables dangling from their ears. To me, that is very uncomfortable. Bluetooth has served me well over the years but I think we need something better and way more energy efficient.

I respect your opinion, but I don't ever want to recharge my headphones or change batteries.

Given that AM radios can be powered by the radio waves, I'll bet small headphones can be powered by small solar cells.

I believe you are talking about crystal radios, where the max volume is a whisper and the sound quality is like a tin can. Above that, it requires a wire stretched several meters to operate, which doesn't scream portable.

They'll be in your ears, so volume isn't the problem. And the sun will likely provide more energy than AM radio unless you're next to the transmitter, even for small solar cells.

If they're in my ears, how do they have sufficient cell surface area and incidence angle? Do I have antennae sticking out the sides of my head like a 1950s movie alien?

20 mW average maximum available power supply for headphones. Add some for the circuitry and radio, I bet you can manage at 500mW.

1368 W/m^2 solar energy on earth on average, or 0.137 W/mm^2 = 137 mW/mm^2. Let's assume 15% solar cell efficiency, so you'll get 20 mW/mm^2 out.

500mW / 20 mW/mm^2 = 25 mm^2. That's how large cells it be exposed to the sun.

Cover both the headphones and cables, and you'll be able to charge any batteries enough to survive the night.

You started out talking about wireless headphones. What cables?

Between your earbuds.

That sounds like solar roadways.

Bluetooth sucks at pairing. A lot of the time I have to try multiple times and it takes me or minute or so to pair. Whereas with headphones connecting takes like two seconds. I want to like Bluetooth but it's not making it easy.

The Plantronics Bluetooth stereo headset I have never fails to connect to my devices on startup. It will connect to two or three at first power up, announcing them as it does so. It has the reverse problem, I then want to signal which device should take priority over the limited bandwidth/processing on the device for audio quality. But I mention it because not all Bluetooth headphones pair to only one device at a time --though all the rest of mine share that limitation. And if USB-C is also an option, pairing fixes could be as easy as the iPad Pro's Pencil pairing: just plug it in and unplug when you want...

I use BT most of the time with a Philips bluetooth audio connector for my stereo. That works most of the time without problem. As long as you use one connection, it works. When I want to use another device to connect to the stereo, that's a problem. Then I suddenly have to reset the connector. And again when I want to go back.

And I honestly can't figure out how people can tolerate connection flakiness, quality issues, and battery drain for a set of headphones. I have tried many BT audio solutions and this is not wanna-be-audiophile pickiness, but the experience is universally substandard as far as I can tell.

Watching a video on my mac, and listening over bluetooth, the audio lags the video by at least 0.5 second, it's unwatchable if there's any sort of dialogue.

That hasn't been my experience at all.

with bluetooth you have a 'choice' between shitty lossy codec and proprietary patent encumbered one.

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