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Comment by jojohohanon | Hacker News Reader

Someone (ASR) claimed years ago, but I noticed only recently that the adapter is actually a fairly high quality DAC.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/q...

so is their USB-C to headphone jack adapter, the US versions anyway https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

the presence of a decent quality DAC in the official dongle is neat. I'm not super surprised, since Apple probably wouldn't want poor-quality audio associated with their brand.

edit 3: the rest of this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion, it's just griping. you are welcome to ignore it.

A DAC in every dongle. A DAC in every pair of earbuds. We went from one DAC to piles of them. I don't know that I will ever stop being bothered by this 'improvement'.

edit: yes, I know we don't actually put DACs in earbuds. I think. Please tell me that's not happening.

edit 2: Oh no that's really what's being done. I didn't realize Audio Accessory Mode was going away.

I don’t know much about this, what’s the issue with shoving DAC’s into everything?

It's wasteful (contributes to e-waste). It also drives up costs or drives down quality at the lower end. Phones are digital devices, so they produce digital audio. Audio is analog, so you have to have a DAC somewhere in the chain. Before the removal of 3.5mm ports, there was a DAC in the phone. Earbuds could be relatively simple devices. No on-board processing, just wires and speakers. Even cheap earbuds ($20) could have decent sound quality.If it was a good phone, it was probably a decent DAC. If your phone had a shit DAC you couldn't correct for that though. Now the phone sends digital audio over USB C. The earbuds, or your dongle, have to contain a DAC. In theory, if you buy an expensive standalone DAC and use good 3.5mm earbuds, or buy good USB C earbuds, this could be an improvement from the previous situation. On the cheap end of the market, it's now harder/more expensive to make earbuds at the same quality as before. Given how disposably people treat earbuds (understandably, since they're easy to lose and easy to break), this all isn't great.

Oh that makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the rundown :)

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