Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims from Andhra thority now we're starting to see a trend where some smartphone manufacturers are doing away with the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and relying solely on a USB type-c port well how does that work and what does it mean for you and for me well let me explain so first let's look at some basics we live in an analog world we hear sounds through sound waves that travel through the air and then hit our eardrum and our brain interprets them as particular types of sound as an analogue way now smartphones don't use analog smartphones use a digital system ones and zeros on and off that's all they understand they don't understand analog at all now when you want to hear a piece of music there has to be somewhere along the line a conversion from this digital system into this analog system now the way that works is like this maybe you've got a piece of mp3 music on your smartphone our mp3 is a lossy compressed format and what happens is your smart phone will decode that to give you the full uncompressed audio stream that will then go through what's called a digital to analog converter a DAC and that DAC produces the analog signal which powers your headphones now of course the quality of that DAC depends on how well that audio signal is produced and different DAX have different capabilities so today what you have is you have your headphones plug into the 3.5 millimeter jack and when the signal hits that 3.5 millimeter jack it's now an all analog signal and that analog signal then goes up the cables to power the headphones now when you're using USB type-c headphones things are a bit different now the mp3 file is decoded to produce the full uncompressed audio stream that goes out to the USB controller on the smartphone into the USB controller that's now on the headphones and then from the USB controller on it goes into a DAC that are in the headphones and that DAC then does the audio conversion which powers your headphones so now the music when it gets to the outside of your phone it's no longer in analog it's now in digital and the conversion from digital to analog happens actually in the headphones themselves now that has the advantage that if your phone has a low quality DAC you can buy high quality headphones with a high quality DAC and that audio conversion happens actually right next to your ears now there is some advantages to that because the digital signal is traveling much further along the chain until only at the last moment it's converting into an analog signal now how good that is whether you can tell the difference that that's up to everybody person one those people that can't tell the difference but this on talking about the technology this is what happens in this situation now one interesting question is what formats the data flow over the USB port into the DAC inside the headphones what android supports what's called USB audio class one and that's a PCM format and that's the same as the kind of thing you find on CD ROMs now actually there are other formats that can be sent over USB for example there's USB audio class - now the purest audio purism and it will tell us that all that class two is better because it offers greater resolution and there are also some proprietary standards that different companies different OEMs are working on now the disadvantage of all these different standards is it actually can mean though in the future you might have a smart phone that won't work with a USB headphone because the DAC in the headphones is expecting the data in one format and it's coming out in a different one now we'll have to see how that washes out at the end but at the moment the USB stand are supported by Android by default is USB audio class one now if you do want to connect your existing headphones with a 3.5 millimeter jack on them how can you do that well of course what can happen is you can have an adapter that goes on the phone and that adapter then gives you a 3.5 mm a meter Jack now look that can happen in two different ways one is that they can actually be a USB controller and a DAC in that adapter in a kind of a dongle that you plug into the bottom of the phone and that dongle does all the hard work all the DAX going on there and then what comes out of that is an analog signal which then goes up to your headphones but also instantly enough the USB type-c specification has two pins which can carry analog signals so in fact all the the simplest adapter is one that plugs in and it takes those analog signals and just does the wiring to give you a 3.5 millimeter jack but that means you're relying on the DAC that's inside the smartphone and that's fine guess what we've been doing up until now but it's just it doesn't give you an extra DAC it doesn't give any control over the DAC so now we can see they're actually three different ways of connecting headphones to a phone that's only got type C one is to use usb headphones with a DAC inside the headphones one is to use a dongle or adapter that has a DAC and a USB controller inside the dongle itself and the third and simplest way is just to use the DAC that's inside the phone and the two analog pins that are in USB type-c get wired into a 3.5 millimeter jack so do please tell me in the comments below what you think about the idea of USB type-c audio does it not matter to you as long as your headphones work you don't care is it really important to you I'd be really interested to hear your comments I'd also like to give a shout out to Robert Riggs because he wrote an excellent article over Android comm that explained all this stuff in greater detail than I've covered in this video well my name's Gary sim from Andrew authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up don't forget to follow me and Andrew authority on social media don't forget to download the and Ora tea app because that will give you access to all of our news and features directly onto your smart phone and don't forget to go to Android rata calm because we are your source for all things Android Oh