As a Fairphone 5 owner, 6 seams like a downgrade to me, with it’s USB 2. I don’t care about whatever refresh rate they have, USB alt mode is way more important to me, also dropping audio jack was bad enough already.
Well, the audio problem is not going to be worse with 2.0. USB 2.0 can deliver 480Mbps. Audio data rates are in Kbps. Even at 192kHz, 24 bui studio recordings it is only 4.6Mbps. Stereo audio is easy from a digital perspective. Also, USB 2.0 is MUCH less susceptible to bad hardware design, bad cables and dongles, and bad shielding. A single twisted pair at low speeds and minimal negotiation is much simpler and almost never drops. In a joystick design I did, I had a 20cm long untwisted pair in testing and it never dropped at all.
USB 3.0+ (and especially external display capabilities) is an order of magnitude more noise sensitive, impedance variation limited, and susceptible to bad design. If you use a non-twisted cable, it won’t even negotiate USB 3.0 and will only work with 2.0.
That being said, USB 3.0+ for large file transfers and an external monitor desktop mode would be so much better, but I guess not many people use those.
Dude, comparing USB headphone consumption to 3.5mm jack headphone power consumption is laughable. The power consumption is so negligible it’s insane. It’s on the order of magnitude if you were to forget to turn off the light in a room for 1 minute each year. Phones themselves consume extremely little power, I forget the exact number but I think it’s in the realm of a few kW/h per year, and USB headphones are going to be a fraction of a percent of that
Do you think headphone jacks don’t use electricity?
I have accubattery on my phone. During the past 3.5 years with it, I have charged 2 143 031 mAh. That is at 3.7V average, 7.93kWh over 3 years.
An dongle jack usually had a chip that uses ~1mW. A headphone alone still has to power the headphones, which is between 0.25mW and 1mW.
That would take 1 000 000 hours in order to have a difference between 1kWh and 0.25kWh ( approximately 0.23€ difference), that is over 114 years of straight listening. That is the same difference of running your oven for about 5 minutes, once.
That is a very weird hill to die on for the environment. That is about 0.001s of energy consumption of a billionaire.
That’s a miniscule amount of energy and when compared to the internal DAC and loss in analog cable with 32 Ω impedance, it might be the same, give or take a few microwatts – negligible compared to other appliances and HVAC. The durability and frequency of buying a new pair is more important if you’re into the environment.
The audio quality for either is more correlated with physical build quality than whether the length of wire is susceptible to noise and own losses (where the USB has an edge). Some headphones have terrible impedance matching and awful drivers no matter the interface they use.
And the “smarter” point: Depends. Support for multiple buttons is hit-and-miss either way. As for audio from non-phones, you might have driver issues for digital or need a line level amplifier for analog.
I prefer the jack because of compatibility with all other hardware and more physical resilience: I don’t want to wear out or dislodge my phone’s charging and data port whille running with headphones.
As a Fairphone 5 owner, 6 seams like a downgrade to me, with it’s USB 2. I don’t care about whatever refresh rate they have, USB alt mode is way more important to me, also dropping audio jack was bad enough already.
Well, the audio problem is not going to be worse with 2.0. USB 2.0 can deliver 480Mbps. Audio data rates are in Kbps. Even at 192kHz, 24 bui studio recordings it is only 4.6Mbps. Stereo audio is easy from a digital perspective. Also, USB 2.0 is MUCH less susceptible to bad hardware design, bad cables and dongles, and bad shielding. A single twisted pair at low speeds and minimal negotiation is much simpler and almost never drops. In a joystick design I did, I had a 20cm long untwisted pair in testing and it never dropped at all.
USB 3.0+ (and especially external display capabilities) is an order of magnitude more noise sensitive, impedance variation limited, and susceptible to bad design. If you use a non-twisted cable, it won’t even negotiate USB 3.0 and will only work with 2.0.
That being said, USB 3.0+ for large file transfers and an external monitor desktop mode would be so much better, but I guess not many people use those.
So it still supports audio out via USB alt mode?
I’m not talking about only audio, video over USB-C is also nice to have.
To be fair I don’t use it that often, but considering that I could never use wifi display streaming on e/os, I’m really happy I have it.
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Usb needs power. That means electricity that means more ftighin climate change.
Headphone jacks are smarter, clearer, and better for the environment
Usb head phones are trick. But hey. Who cates. Its the apocalypse
Dude, comparing USB headphone consumption to 3.5mm jack headphone power consumption is laughable. The power consumption is so negligible it’s insane. It’s on the order of magnitude if you were to forget to turn off the light in a room for 1 minute each year. Phones themselves consume extremely little power, I forget the exact number but I think it’s in the realm of a few kW/h per year, and USB headphones are going to be a fraction of a percent of that
Do you think headphone jacks don’t use electricity?
I have accubattery on my phone. During the past 3.5 years with it, I have charged 2 143 031 mAh. That is at 3.7V average, 7.93kWh over 3 years.
An dongle jack usually had a chip that uses ~1mW. A headphone alone still has to power the headphones, which is between 0.25mW and 1mW.
That would take 1 000 000 hours in order to have a difference between 1kWh and 0.25kWh ( approximately 0.23€ difference), that is over 114 years of straight listening. That is the same difference of running your oven for about 5 minutes, once.
That is a very weird hill to die on for the environment. That is about 0.001s of energy consumption of a billionaire.
You’re over analyzing. Wasn’t comparing it to s anything cept blur-tooth and wireless wich do use more.
Point was the needlesness of wireless over wired. Guess I didn’t articulate it well
That’s a miniscule amount of energy and when compared to the internal DAC and loss in analog cable with 32 Ω impedance, it might be the same, give or take a few microwatts – negligible compared to other appliances and HVAC. The durability and frequency of buying a new pair is more important if you’re into the environment.
The audio quality for either is more correlated with physical build quality than whether the length of wire is susceptible to noise and own losses (where the USB has an edge). Some headphones have terrible impedance matching and awful drivers no matter the interface they use.
And the “smarter” point: Depends. Support for multiple buttons is hit-and-miss either way. As for audio from non-phones, you might have driver issues for digital or need a line level amplifier for analog.
I prefer the jack because of compatibility with all other hardware and more physical resilience: I don’t want to wear out or dislodge my phone’s charging and data port whille running with headphones.