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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering, how do people connect two headphones to a single phone? Is that possible with Bluetooth or any other connection method that's not a headphone jack?

It seems to me that some people got sloppy with the requirements analysis of their connector.

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Bluetooth 5.0 supports 2 devices being output at once.

> It seems to me that some people got sloppy with the requirements analysis of their connector.

I guess I'd have to throw this back at you and ask if you know a lot of people who use 2 headphones on a single phone. Considering phones are largely personal items, I feel like that was probably a super small subset of the user base.

Lidl's own-brand headphones have a 3.5mm connector on the opposite earcup to the cable, so you can daisy-chain them. My children do so frequently, so they can watch Minecraft videos without annoying their parents.

Oh, that's a neat feature!

Also handy if you break the cable as can use that port with a 3.5mm to 3.5mm connector and back working - cutt off the offending broken cable that is a nightmare to fix as are most headphone cables, bit like soldering two hairs together with solder that melts at the same temp as the wire as it is sooo small - though I'm not great at soldering.

Ideally wished they would just include a replaceable lead like some do - but the Lidls ones work well, cheap and in recent sale - less than £5 - bargain and also fair quality.

> Bluetooth 5.0 supports 2 devices being output at once.

Ok that's good. But do devices actually support it?

E.g. Bluetooth historically had flaky software support on Android, and sadly I can't even imagine that they'd get anything in that 5.0 spec correct that's outside the main usecase of single person listens to audio.

> and ask if you know a lot of people who use 2 headphones on a single phone

In e.g. the subway I often see people listening in pairs using a single headset. I think it's not a really strange feature to ask for.

I can't speak to it's reliability.

> In e.g. the subway I often see people listening in pairs using a single headset. I think it's not a really strange feature to ask for.

So two pairs of headphones, or one pair of headphones and each using one either? Either way, you're going to need something custom (dongle or headphones) for that.

It seems that iOS 13 will let you connect 2 pairs of Airpods/Beats at the same time

Edit: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/11/how-to-share-your...

It's definitely possible to have multiple Bluetooth peripherals on a single device in the general case (see: laptop with wireless keyboard and headphones). So that would just come down to software on a per-phone basis (and may or may not be a feature an app could add if it's not supported baseline).

having a headphone jack does not mean you won't have Bluetooth

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