Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

The $199 is why most people will question if you really need it. My laptop costed me a little bit over that, so maybe there is something in the market that goes 80% of the way for about 20% of its price?

View on HN

The USB-C headphone adaptors sold by Google / Apple / Samsung / etc are DAC + headphone amps. They're inexpensive (under $20, some under $10) and can have better components in them than a phone, laptop, etc. These should also work on laptops / desktops.

Do some research first for your use case, but I suspect one can find one that will work for your machine + headphones.

Soundguys has a review from October up on this topic: https://www.soundguys.com/best-usb-c-headphone-adapter-10130...

My favorite part about these dongles is that for once, Apple actually has the best performance / price!

It compares favorably against equipment hundreds of dollars more (focus on SINAD & Output Impedance graphs): https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

Does Apple not usually have the best performance / price? Looking at M- and A- series chip benchmarks, Apple is way ahead of the competition.

Apple prices are also way above the competition so they hamstring themselves somewhat.

Apple prices are comparable to the competition for comparable gear. If you don't want to spend much money, PC vendors will happily sell you garbage -- Apple won't.

For the same money I can get a better machine that what Apple will sell me.

Admittedly this calculus may have shifted in Apple's favor a bit when they rolled out their own silicon.

This is a myth, only supported by looking at nothing but spec sheets.

I admit, I was one of these people, but when you look at incidentals (ironically the DAC such as this thread, but also things like keyboard, calibrated display, the nebulous concept of “build quality”) Apple is comparable in price to contemporaries.

The issue is that Apple computers are built like higher end business laptops, and people dont typically buy those: they look at the spec sheet and try to buy the best bang for the buck which makes all of the quality run out the door.

Apples lowest end machines generally are priced cheaper than equivalent machines, but Apple price segments (read: gouges) on upgrades.

A high end Macbook pro 14” and a Dell XPS (55xx) are comparable in price.

I've had an Apple device from work until ~2 years ago. It laid on my desk most of the time, not even in use so wear and tear are at a minimum. A region of the touchscreen broke around the same time as the charging brick stopped charging (2-3 years after purchase; the brick was only plugged in when in use), the keyboard didn't support swyping or having a number row or any symbols on its face whatsoever, the browser is ancient and gives me headaches as a developer constantly (and you can't even tell users to install a proper browser - remind me, what did the EC think of that when Microsoft pulled this with MSIE?), the idle battery life was worse than an eight year old Samsung I've got, of course it needed a custom cable, it kept turning on things I had turned off such as Bluetooth (see the recent Bluetooth attack), and my device was the only one that had hard-to-reproduce issues with Wireguard VPN.

(I never had a charger or touchscreen break on me before, nor a battery wear so fast, so combined with the unusually low use, I'm pretty sure it's not my particular usage pattern that caused them to break way before due.)

Credits where they're due, though: it had a headphone jack and I loved the earphones that came with it! But what a piece of trash otherwise.

I'm sure there's good apple phones out there and our resident apple fanboy assured me I had an outlier, but I can attest that apple does in fact sell you garbage and not all the issues are hardware

Apple does not generally have the best performance / price: if we use passmark benchmarks[1], the 16-core M3 Max gets 10CPUMark/$, while the ASUS ROG Strix G17 gets 25CPUMark/$.

If we look at the low-end, it is much worse: the cheapest Macbook Pro ($1600) gets 12CPUMark/$, while the Dell Inspiron 15 3535 ($420) gets 45CPUMark/$.

I know there's much more to laptops than their CPUs, but I think my point is still valid.

[1]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html#cpumark

Yeah, we’d have to include display quality, battery life, etc. to get a really fair comparison.

Okay, go ahead. What does a good display cost? How many Joules per megaflop does the CPU draw from the battery? The claim is a bit baseless as-is; you seem to know the answer already but how?

Does the Apple usb-c version have the same issue as the lightning version where very slight movements will cause it to interrupt playback with various accessibility messages? This was an issue for both my last iphones making the cable entirely unusable in any situation where your phone might move. Frankly I'd say it is so bad that Apple's lightning to headphone adapters shouldn't be allowed to be sold.

I've only used mine for maybe about 8 hours on my Pixel 6a, but I never ran into that or any issues.

It's not really an issue with the cable, but with the iphone's use of the cable. If the iphone allowed you to just turn off the specific accessibility features so you would never be asked by this misinterpreted signal, the problem would go away.

I have one. I have used it pretty much every night on my phone at bedtime for a few years. If it is plugged in properly it works perfectly every time. I have a few others xduoo, moondrop etc. But I always use this one in my room.

Do you move the connector while it’s plugged in e.g. if you have the phone in your pocket plugged in and then connected to wired headphones? The lightning connector works fine when you don’t move it, but not when you do.

I have used the lightning headphone adapter on my iphone almost daily for a couple of years. Whenever I have problems like you describe it's because the lightning port has dirt/pocket lint in it. I have a plastic tool that I use to clean it out and it works fine again. The only other issue I have is that the thin wire does wear out over time.

I've used entirely new adapters in an entirely new phone and had the issue. Many I know have experienced the same (before giving up on using the adapter wile moving). But it's true I've also heard from people like you who haven't had issues so I can't personally say it's always a problem.

But really what I don't understand is how Apple can't just add an option to turn off the damn accessibility options entirely. Why does dirt or temporary bad connections cause this problem at all? They could just let you turn off the setting that it triggers so that it really doesn't matter. The fact that they don't care enough to do that tells me enough of how much they care about making their headphone adapter a good product. I never used to have to worry about issues like this with a regular headphone jack, but I certainly do with Apple's adapter. It's simply a poor product.

I must be missing something because that page doesn't have any reviews, it's just a list of 5 adapters with one sentence each about "why it's great" and giant Amazon referral links.

Although I must admit I did not expect the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter to be so affordable. I don't have any Apple devices but I wonder if will work with Android/Linux.

I have used the USB-C apple adapter with linux and it works fine. I used it for a year hooked up to an older dell laptop (Xubuntu and later Manjaro) for my home sound system (spotify client on the laptop). Works great for the money. I eventually moved to a standalone dac. Not sure it sounds any better but is more versatile.

I'm partial to this Head-Fi review [1]. It's a really interesting read, just from the perspective of comparing a $9 USB DAC to ... pretty much anything else an "audiophile" might get.

> There is absolutely no reason at all to pay more for a USB DAC, at least when it comes to pure sound quality with headphones.

It does mention the possible desire for more features, of course. And it's possibly worth mentioning the power output is half of what you get from other DACs, but you should consider whether that means anything to your setup. I have a pair of Hifiman Edition XS connected to a Schiit Magni and the Apple USB C DAC, and I never put the Schiit volume above about 30%.

(As to the amp: I do hear a bit of an improvement connected to the amp vs just the DAC. It's not huge, though; mainly I like having a physical volume knob.)

1: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/apple-usb-c-to-3-5-mm-headp...

This exactly. As a former PA/recording engineer I like good audio quality too, but it is hard to know which devices are worth it when most lists are made by people that always like the $200 (or $2000) option better than the $2, $20 and $199 option. I know for a fact from actually using audio equipment where good quality is needed that the expensive options are often not worth it at all, but more often than not swap a tiny (if any) bit of extra quality for a monstrous price hike and worse hardiness.

Of course, I'm not saying it isn't worth it at all. That depends on one's budget and ears. But most lists see the expensive option as the best, while most peoples needs and ears have zero use for the expensive option.

I'd go so far as saying you could get 95% of the way for 10% of the price.

It's like the old story:

   - one high quality capacitor: $1
   - knowing where to put it: $799
   [dark timeline: “knowing it doesn't matter where you put it: $12999”]

If you need both good measurements that should by ample margin be audible transparent, as well as enough power for virtually any headphone save those that need a special amplifier (electrostats like STAX's), you'll find it hard to go under $200.

This device is actually a gem for the price, and most popular recommendations will go higher in price and give you less. I have been there and done the digging, you're welcome to repeat the process.

At some point, new devices or new prices will change this. But, as far as I am aware, this is how it is right now.

The Topping MX3 is also pretty good in my opinion and about half the price. That’s probably next down on the pareto frontier.

Not if you want decent sound quality. I think my absolute minimum recommendation would be the Fiio K3 dac-amp with a pair of headphones like the DT770 or the SHP9500 if you can find them cheap.

HD600>HD560s>SHP9500 according to budget.

If there's any money left, it can be allocated to a dac/amp combo, but priority to headphones, as they matter the most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com