Cheap Third-Party 'Lightning' Headphones Are Often Cheap Bluetooth Headphones | Hacker News Reader

Cheap Third-Party 'Lightning' Headphones Are Often Cheap Bluetooth Headphones

daringfireball.net

27 pointsrobenkleene9 comments

> Actual Lightning headphones and headphone adapters have a tiny little digital-to-analog converter (DAC) inside the Lightning plug. It’s like a little computer. Doing it with Bluetooth and using the Lightning plug only for power is surely easier.

So how does he think the adapter ultimately converts digital audio received over Bluetooth to analog audio output over a 3.5mm headphone plug?

In other words, what makes a DAC "a little computer", but a Bluetooth SoC plus the same type of DAC "surely easier"?

Just guessing, but they might mean that designing and manufacturing entire digital-to-analog conversion system from scratch is expensive. But using Bluetooth SoCs and off the shelf DACs can be cheaper and therefore "surely easier"?

Yes, this is what I meant. I’m guessing these cheap fake Lightning headphones that use Bluetooth are just using off-the-shelf Bluetooth components that are dirt-cheap, and that there are no equivalent “off-the-shelf” Lightning components.

Lightning headphones boil down to the MFi chip and cheap USB sound card (think PCM2904). Apple even provides combination of these two functions in single package. Lightning is essentially a combination of two USB HS channels on one connector, one upstream and one downstream.

You'd be shocked how cheap you can get a Bluetooth headset chipset. They're so simple and made in such high quantities that they're nearly free.

I don't know what apple charged for lightning licenses, but it has to have been a lot for this to make any sense.

I will say though, I've never seen a wired Bluetooth headset. I'd bet the license cost less than a battery, but much less than a knockoff power-only cable.

I discovered this a couple years back, truly the worst. I don't know what kind of cynical cargo-culting fools are wasting resources, designing this junk and selling it to unsuspecting people who don't read the fine print.

I've been burned buying "name brand" stuff on Amazon too many times (counterfeit garbage drop shipped instead) so for anything Apple I go to an authorized Apple reseller, not ScAmazon.

I don't know what kind of cynical, extortionary company produces phones with a proprietary adapter protocol implementing DRM to make it hard to produce third-party alternatives to their first-party USB-to-audio dongles.

If you take a look at the USB-C adapter ecosystem, you most likely won't find such shenanigans – because manufacturers can just do the right thing there and hook up a DAC to a small SoC that speaks the USB audio protocol directly.

If Amazon sends you counterfeit goods, do you at least report it with the police and demand your money back? That's the only way to stop them.

It's baffling that such a large, well established and legitimate company as Amazon can apparently get away with selling counterfeit goods.

Original discussion (sans the incorrect technical conclusion by Gruber): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40528410

Reply on news.ycombinator.com