Hi everyone, I need your help with something.
My old JBL headphones are starting to degrade, and so I’m looking for a replacement. As I have a FairPhone now, I don’t have an aux jack anymore. I’m also not a huge fan of audio over bluetooth.
So I’ve started searching for some simple over-ear or on-ear cabled headphones that connect with a USB C cable. I have found one from lenovo, but it is a headset with a boom mic. Ideally I just want headphones, simple and robust. I don’t care about noise-cancelling or other bells and whistles.
Anyone have anything?
Note: I know adapters are a thing. I find them annoying and prone to damage. I don’t want to use one.
Aside from the pigtail USB-C -> 3.5 socket adapters which absolutely do suck, you can also get USB-C -> 3.5 plug cables (link for example purposes only, not an endorsement of amazon or this product) which can be pretty decent length and quality. This, together with headphones with a replaceable cable (also just an example) might open up a few more options for you. Added bonus that if the cable fails it’s … well … replaceable.
Just be mindful that some manufacturers do the extremely shitty thing of placing the socket on the headphones in a very specifically shaped recess that only their cables will fit.
Any USB-C to 3.5 dongle that has a DAC module will be miles better than just the straight cable converter for a fraction of the price and not going into an extensive array of hardware, it just depends how far OP wants to go down the audible rabbit hole.
Thanks for the tip. I hope I can find a cable that has such a module, then finding the headphones themselves should be relatively easy.
I’m fine with rabbit holes, I’m an engineer, that’s kinda what we do all day anyway.
No worries. If it’s going about day to day errands with some music in your ears, the DAC dongle is probably your best bet in terms of keeping what you have to carry compact.
Thanks! This will probably be the best option for me.
That sounds like a good idea, actually. A lot of those adapters/cables are bastardisations of the USB-C standard, and just re-use a couple of pins to pass on analog audio. I’ve seen at least three variations of it. If it’s not standard, it should not be possible to plug it in to any standard socket.
The right way to do it is with a proper digital-to-analog converter in the adapter. I hope that’s the most common way today, but I haven’t shopped around in recent years.
It’s still shitty because they ship with a 3.5mm -> 3.5mm cable (literally straight through, no inline silicon) that’s billed as replaceable. It is, but only with -their- cable. It’s a way of making a standard connection proprietary.