Apple's USB-C to headphone dongle works on Android, I believe, and is regularly reviewed to have the same audio quality as comparably expensive DACs. It's $9
As described in the above PCWorld link, the problem is that the standard is open ended and the ecosystem didn't all agree on how to deal with analog vs digital audio signals and devices. Some USB-C headphones or adapters will be happy with whatever. Others will not.
Since some phones can output an analog audio signal over the USB-C connector (and ship dongles without a DAC), while others output digital only and rely on the dongle including its own DAC, the argument absolutely does not go the other way. Any lightning headphones or lighting to 3.5mm dongle will work on any phone with a lightning port.
EDIT: Here's a separate complaint - if you want to charge an iPhone while you have headphones plugged in, there are at least splitter/dongle accessories for that. USB-C Android phone? Good luck.
>Android Police reported that Google quietly pulled the listing for the one adapter it had in its online store without ever selling it. The product is also unavailable on the manufacturer’s website. According to Android Police, a few units did ship from Amazon, but the reviews were so bad that the product was quickly pulled.
That's what I thought too, but then I just bought enough $10 usb-c to headphone dongles for all of the headphones I usually use (one at home, one at work one in the car and one in my backpack). iPhone dongles work on the Pixel too.
Sucks to have to pay $40 just to restore the functionality of the headphone jack, but kept it from being a dealbreaker.
> then use another type of connector for headphones.
USB-C is a nice connector, and for digital headsets it is pretty nice, but it has some disadvantages (and advantages!) compared to standard headphone jack:
1. Portable devices tend to only have 1, so no listening to music while charging. Common in car scenarios, not all cars have BT audio, and BT audio implementations in cars can vary in quality by large factors.
2. Sound degradation over BT is a problem. Recompressing an already compressed file (e.g. MP3) is going to result in a loss of quality. Since a lot of music is streamed at a bitrate that is "just above noticeable loss", further compression will result in a sound quality decrease.
3. It moves the DAC to outside the phone. This is mostly a good thing, assuming the dongle uses a good DAC, and eventually we'll see third party high quality USB-C DACs (as are already present on desktops for traditional USB)
4. Pure USB-C headphones require more engineering, and they require a type of engineering that headphone companies are not traditionally familiar with. Headphone companies are experts in making high quality analog sound systems, shoehorning the need for digital expertise is needless. (Though more and more headphone companies already have a digital team, it does raise the bar for new entrants.)
5. The AUX jack is pretty damn good. Replacing it with a digital jack isn't really needed. Even with a huge industry push, it'll be many many years before USB-C is everywhere, and if you count the professional markets, it will likely be decades, if ever. (This isn't helped by Apple pushing a competing standard!) Digital means software, which means things can and will go wrong. With an analog plug the quality of the signal is the quality of the physical connection and the wiring going between them, and as a species we have almost over a century of knowledge about analog signals. With digital, ideally quality never degrades, but with firmware/software bugs it can degrade, and to get optimal quality it'll require every device in a chain not have any bugs related to sound quality.
If you don't want cheap, shitty USB-C headphones... don't get them? I really don't get your point.
3.5mm to USB-C adapters are tiny and can include a much higher quality DAC than most phones reasonably will. Into those, you can then plug any headphone your heart or ears desire.
Audiophiles are such a niche market all things considered, and on top of that they seem to prefer their own DACs and/or headphone pre-amplifiers anyway – why waste space and money for a headphone jack that most users wouldn't use, and the ones that do would augment with external dongles anyway?
And for users that just don't want to deal with charging and pairing Bluetooth headphones, cheap headphones and adapters do just fine as well.
It's easy and cheap to get USB-C to headphone jack adaptors, so anyone who wants to use wired headphones can do so. (The Apple one is $9, and we know how they like to gouge on accessories.) I've also seen simultaneous headphone-and-charging variants for under $10.
Personally, I could never stand using wired headphones with my phone, so I wouldn't want to do it. But the option's there.
My understanding is that many USB-C adapters limit voltage, which screws over good headphones. Also from experience of using a DAC via USB-C everyday for many years, they're really really unreliable.
3.5mm on the other hand just works and is (was? ) ubiquitous.
> get an adapter, with the additional downside that you can no longer charge the phone while using those headphones.
Shouldn't such an adapter have a female USB-C connector and pass that through to the male one, with the headphone jack being branched off? Do those not exist, or are they prohibitively expensive? Did the Apple "dongle" mentioned in sibling comments do it that way? (Sure oughta, IMO.)
You can buy a cheap dongle to plug your headphones into the USB-C port. It works fine, but now you have the problem of keeping track of the dongle when they kids unplug it.
That's not really a better alternative, now is it.
Now your headphones must come with all the electronics required for USB-C and their own seperate DACs. This means they're going to be slightly more expensive without any actual improvement over your 3.5mm headphones. Not to mention all of those threats of DRM and whatnot looming around. So with that in mind, why would I possibly want to make the move to USB-C?
USB-C headphones are either free and desperately shit or a very expensive mic+headset arrangement, not simply "headphones".
And adaptors are universally unreliable. The one my samsung phone came with works with literally NOTHING else, and the 4 or 5 I've bought have connection issues.
Also if you care about audio it's another slap in the face as the DACs in those adaptors are pretty high-noise.
A related tip - if you've got a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with its awful internal headphone audio, try Apple's USB-C To Headphone dongle. It's a cheap but effective audio upgrade, and the competition (like the M-Audio Micro-DAC) is about 4x the price. It even adds support for Apple inline headphone volume controls too.
That depends a lot on the headphones and phone you're using there's annoyingly no real way to know exactly what usb-c audio method your phone and headphones are using and there are some annoying incompatibilities.
Either way they can use the USB-C jack to send digital data to headphones and cheaper ones just won't work because they're built for the analog passthrough version of usb-c audio.
The main issue for me personally is not being able to charge and listen to audio at the same time. The main use case for headphones on my phone for me is watching streaming video in bed and that drains the battery pretty fast.
I know there's a (kind of bulky) dongle for charging + headphones, but I'd rather buy a device that has the ports I need already.
The $9 adapter is cool though. Afaik it's pretty much the best budget usb dac around.
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