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Comment by rmwaite | Hacker News Reader

man. you're in the audio industry. most people are not. I'm talking the VAST majority of people. So they should cater to you? I think it is not unreasonable to expect the professional to have whatever equipment they need - there are aux adapters for USB C and lightning. They are small. They are inexpensive.

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This was an unnecessary change no matter how you slice it. Just look at the other options: bluetooth or an adapter. With bluetooth you have to pair it and remember to charge the headphones. With an adapter you have to remember to bring it everywhere if you want to listen to a podcast or music or audio book. They say they're making a simple device but they're making my life more complicated. This is one of the few times where I'll get upset over such a simple change, especially since I was planning to buy a Pixel 2 until they announced this.

I'm not an audio professional and I think there's far more like me that you can't ignore.

then use another type of connector for headphones. aux does not have to be the only connector forever. what makes this so special that it is the only connector that people refuse to upgrade? EVERY OTHER CONNECTOR has gone through improvements. new USB standards. new video. everything. why is this any different?

AUX has been replaced, there is a new standard in the industry – but no one uses it for consumer products.

AUX is the only standard used by both consumers and professionals, and losing that would be very annoying.

> then use another type of connector for headphones.

USB-C is a nice connector, and for digital headsets it is pretty nice, but it has some disadvantages (and advantages!) compared to standard headphone jack:

1. Portable devices tend to only have 1, so no listening to music while charging. Common in car scenarios, not all cars have BT audio, and BT audio implementations in cars can vary in quality by large factors.

2. Sound degradation over BT is a problem. Recompressing an already compressed file (e.g. MP3) is going to result in a loss of quality. Since a lot of music is streamed at a bitrate that is "just above noticeable loss", further compression will result in a sound quality decrease.

3. It moves the DAC to outside the phone. This is mostly a good thing, assuming the dongle uses a good DAC, and eventually we'll see third party high quality USB-C DACs (as are already present on desktops for traditional USB)

4. Pure USB-C headphones require more engineering, and they require a type of engineering that headphone companies are not traditionally familiar with. Headphone companies are experts in making high quality analog sound systems, shoehorning the need for digital expertise is needless. (Though more and more headphone companies already have a digital team, it does raise the bar for new entrants.)

5. The AUX jack is pretty damn good. Replacing it with a digital jack isn't really needed. Even with a huge industry push, it'll be many many years before USB-C is everywhere, and if you count the professional markets, it will likely be decades, if ever. (This isn't helped by Apple pushing a competing standard!) Digital means software, which means things can and will go wrong. With an analog plug the quality of the signal is the quality of the physical connection and the wiring going between them, and as a species we have almost over a century of knowledge about analog signals. With digital, ideally quality never degrades, but with firmware/software bugs it can degrade, and to get optimal quality it'll require every device in a chain not have any bugs related to sound quality.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty good Kickstarter idea.

Usb-C to 3.5mm jack, where it isn't a dongle, but rather built into the cable itself.

> EVERY OTHER CONNECTOR has gone through improvements. new USB standards. new video. everything. why is this any different?

Because BT isn't an improvement. It's a worse experience in almost every way.

>EVERY OTHER CONNECTOR has gone through improvements. new USB standards. new video. everything. why is this any different?

Physical improvements have been necessary for USB to increase bandwidth. 3.5mm is a connector for carrying two (sometimes 3) analog signals, and backwards-incompatible changes aren't necessary until we develop a third ear.

What I really don't get is why we want to move the DAC into the headphone. It just makes sense to have a single DAC in the phone, that anything can plug into. Now every set of headphones needs its own DAC to convert that digital bluetooth/USB signal into something you can actually hear.

My unsubstantiated guess: It's phase 1 for some new DRM scheme

DRM audio(or worse, DAC) authentication over a USB-C connection.

Your storage device has to handshake with the playback device. Maybe HDCP over USB?

Hi, member of the vast majority of people here. I don't want to have to carry a dongle.

I'm not in the audio industry. I need the headphone jack.

Nexus 5X owner. I won't buy one of these due to lack of aux output, and I'm not in "the industry".

Everybody with a pair of wired headphones would appreciate a standard jack, too.

I agree the fact that a huge majority of headphones are still sold with the standard head phone jack - means the move is too early. Last release they even mentioned the head phone jack as a feature (and it was)..

I'll be sticking with my pixel xl

Then don't buy this phone. Headphones will soon all be either wireless or use USB C or lighting anyway. And if there are headphones that do not, use an adapter.

No one is going to move to usb c or lightning, it offers absolutely no intrinsic advantages over the 3.5 jack and isn’t going away from laptops, desktops, speakers and other electronics. You’ll just buy dongles or Bluetooth.

They end up having an intrinsic advantage when they are the only port present. I want the same jack for my headphones on my phone and laptop. I wish it was a 3.5mm, but since it isn't I'd prefer a lightning or USB C that did.

I won't, but I also don't want this regression to catch on and propagate.

I bought headphones from Sennheiser with lifelong guarantee once, and I plan to use them until I die, just like my parents used their Sennheisers for decades.

There’s many people exactly like that.

There might be many people like that, but given the cost of such headphones they'd have to be a small percentage of the overall population of phone/headphone users.

They don’t have to be super expensive – even 160€ headphones from sennheiser are awesome, and you can get replacement parts and repairs for decades.

Are these the ones with lifelong guarantees that you mentioned and I was responding to?

No, only 24 to 60 months of all failures repaired, for free, without questions asked.

Afterwards you can get all parts replaced for basically nothing, though, or buy the replacement parts and do it yourself (I just replaced the leather pads and cabling on mine)

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