You should be able to get PCM digital out AND analog directly from the lightning connector. My adapter is still in the box but I do intend to hook it up to one of my Allen & Heath boards in the studio and run it through its paces. To date the best phone for driving headphones, even big power hungry cans, was the HTC 10!
The technology that produces the audio we listen to has nothing to do with the connection type: the drivers of a set of earphone do not 'improve' just because there is lighting connector. For example, in top-of-the-range in-ear-monitors (earphones) like the Westone and the Shure the cable can be replaced; Westone makes a bluetooth cable, meaning the same set of earphones can be used as wired or as bluetooth.
From what I understand, lightning headphones could potentially be better if they have some sort of DAC that supports 24bit, hi-res audio. s far as I know, there is no other potential advantage in terms of audio quality; if there is, I'd like to know - this was the whole point of my thread before it got hijacked! To get hi-res audio, however, you need:
- software which supports it
- files encoded in 24-bit: no use playing a 128 kbit mp3 with hi-res equipment!
- a DAC; 24-bit DACs are not tiny; will Apple be able to squeeze one into a set of headphones? I doubt it; definitely not in a pair of earphones
All of this tends to be bulky (because of the DAC), expensive, useless for all the currently available not hi-res audio content, plus you will need very good ears to tell the difference.
My two cents is that, for 99.99% of users, lightning will NOT result in better quality of the audio.
On that last point (needing good ears): we humans tend to be extremely unreliable; just telling someone that product A is more expensive than product B is likely to lead them to think that A is better. For example, there is a very strong reason why medical trials are conducted as double-blind: patients don't know if they are in the placebo group, and nor do the doctors monitoring their progress. Just like many wine connoisseurs struggle to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine in a blind tasting, I do wonder how many audiophiles would be able to really tell the difference among different types of headphones.
Since lightning is so versatile this opens a market for a plethora of devices. Cases can be installed on the phone with built in credit card readers that take chip cards. Square can't do that. If you've shopped at the Apple store you have seen these devices in action.
There was no need to remove the audio jack to do these things, though. Oh, and you can potentially do the same with microusb or usb-C.
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The 1/8" TRS connection is dead. Glad to see it go on our devices TBH.
I remember when the floppy disk drive was killed off abruptly and people squealed about that too.
The difference is that floppy disk was becoming inadequate: we needed more storage, and other solutions offered that. None of this is even remotely applicable to the audio jack. The audio jack is not inadequate nor obsolete; the connector (jack, usb, lightning or else) does not affect the technology which actually produces the sound we listen to; getting hi-res audio through lightning is possible, just like it is with the audio jack, but it has the same drawbacks it has with the jack: bulk, cost, inapplicability to the vast majority of current content, etc.