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Comment by obrisintor | Hacker News Reader

> No 3.5 mm jack

Oh well

I personally didn't find the lack of 3.5 mm jack to be as big of an issue as I thought it will be. I just attached the USB-C-to-3.5mm adapter that came in the box to the headphone cable and forgot about it.

Do you know if these converters are device specific or can I plug them into any USB-C port on any computer and have sound come out of my headphones.

On iPhones at least, the Lightning-to-jack dongle is actually a whole DAC. Also a DAC that works on Android wouldn't necessarily work on iPhones.

It varies from adapter to adapter. The one that came with my Pixel works on my 2018 MBP.

Some phones support audio accessory mode, which is a way to reserve some pins for analog audio signals. In this case, you only need a passive adapter. There's no reason why desktop or laptops computers couldn't support it, too, but if they do, it's rare. So such an adapter is unlikely to work with a computer, and may not work with all phones.

The alternative is an active device, with its own DAC and amplifier. This is more likely to work with all your devices; I'm pretty sure I could connect my desktop computer's external USB headphone amp to my android phone and it'd just work.

Details: https://www.soundguys.com/usb-audio-explained-18563/ https://www.androidcentral.com/usb-c-audio

I found it to be a really big issue. But i guess it is about expectations. I bought iPhone XS expecting it to be a none-issue, but it also doesn't come with a converter.

This is an important feature for me and I don't think the rest of the phone can make up for the lack of such an important feature.

I use Arduino nano for that. I've programmed the port on Arduino to support any amount of new devices with any port.

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