The 1/4" jacks became standard before metric ruled the world. Besides, 1/4" jacks are way sturdier than 3.5mm posts. Now if the metric guys came up with a 7.0mm jack - we can talk transition.
I believe it is, it’s not entirely uncommon to see both described. I’m in the U.S. and been working with audio my whole life, 1/4" is for sure the named standard but 6.5mm is often referenced due to the headphone size of 3.5mm often being called that size instead of the 1/8". Especially if you’re looking to buy online,
Why headphones are referred to by 3.5mm and the rest (basically) is 1/4" is a silly thing but hey, I don’t make the colloquialisms.
The only thing you’d want to watch out for is whether your cable is mono or stereo, which is independent from the barrel size, but does need the barrel to have 2 rings (TRRS vs. TRS), to complete the Tip Ring Sleeve connection.
But yeah, if you need 1/4" and can only find 6.5mm you’ll be fine
any idea why jbs headphones do a 2.5 male and 3.5 male wire thing? also ik this is offtopic but im looking for headphones that i can use with my audio interface (ive an adapter if needed) and are wireless (so both wired and wireless in one). thoughts? (professional musician btw)
IIRC theirs are set to 2.5mm at the headphone with 3.5mm as for the device connector. This is pretty common for companies that want to make some form of proprietary connection.
Usually these decisions are media because proprietary connections make them more money selling three or four components of 0.02c cables turned into $5-$25 sales per cable. From a consumer perspective, the only upside to it is that having a replaceable cable can increase longevity, and I suppose from a company perspective in order to ensure 100% compatibility, best to sell your version. That way any 3rd party cables can be the problem.
I think 2.5mm used to be used more commonly on old dumb phones for those headsets and stuff like that. I still see them sometimes but these days it’s mostly present on dual plugs like walkies, which is pretty much for mic and audio with a locking mechanism to keep it in place.
Currently I don’t have any suggestions for wired/wireless headphones, I wish I did. At the moment my set is the Beyerdynamics DT 990 Pro, I was looking into a version with detachable cables but none that I came across also had wireless - though they’re surely out there. It would be nice to have a set to swap between Bluetooth and plugged in.
Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller 'phone jacks' is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
Would be better with XLR, but anyway, the jack is the standard that was used in the very first electric guitars.
I’m not sure why they chose that one at the time, but it was the same kind of connection used in telephone boards, so it was already a standard for audio long before the invention of electric guitars. The jack was invited in 1877. Makes sense to use something that already existed and had proven to be reliable and available.
The reason they’re still used is for backward compatibility. Other cabled instruments and microphones have changed standards through the years, but because guitars need to be paired with all kinds of amplifiers and stomp boxes from various manufacturers from different decades, it’s impossible for one brand to change the standard.
A curious fact is that the 1/4 jack is the longest running connection standard.
With many professionals using wireless cables these days, it could more easily be changed, but at the same time, since going without a cable also removes many of the issues with the jack, there’s really no need to change it.
I guess so. The phoneline in my house only has two wires (middle pair of a rj11) so it could work just as well on a guitar cable. It runs at 20/2 mb, which is about maximum for this sort of line. Works alright for TV streaming and office work, but it’s too slow for keeping up with the daily gigabytes of game updates.
So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?
I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.
That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.
But I am not a sound engineer. I’m curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.
Analog connections are very universal. You don’t need to deal with handshakes between devices, sample rate differences, clock systems etc. because each device receives and outputs analog signal via mostly the same 1/4" jacks and plugs.
While a digital signal chain would have overall latency benefits and fewer A/D/A conversions, it just doesn’t matter that much with modern hardware.
Something weird with guitarist is that we want that bad fuzzy sound from low tech analog amplifiers. With today tech we can have high fidelity amps (even analog). However, we want some distorsion/grain ideally the same as on violonistes have an obsession for century old varnish, electric guitarists are obsessed by vintage electronic. To be fair all the issues from early electronic are what made the electric guitar sound cool.
Then another factor is that for a while, digital effect were pretty bad, and still have that reputation, they also look less cool than analog
I hear ya. I play in a celtic rock band where the violin basically fills the ecological niche of a lead guitar for instrumentals. So while I tend to prefer a clean acoustic sound, I do have a few pedals to add distortion and such.
Generally these days the run from stage to mixing desk is digital.
What you want to avoid is too many conversions. At some point the signal is analog, like strings or vocal cords vibrating. Ideally you’ll only have one conversion to digital- say, the stage box you plug the mic into. From there it’s digital through foldback desk, front of house mixing desk, effects, recording, etc all the way up to and including amplifiers, which will convert back to high power analog to drive the speakers.
Having a bunch of other conversions in there - eg guitar pickup to digital, back to analog for the amplifier stage, digital to the desk, analog out to digital amps, all introduce latency and quality degradation.
Wow I don’t think I’ve seen that before? Every stage setup for me has been more or less the same. You plug your 1/4" into a DI box which then connects to the mixing board over a long XLR cable. And the mics run directly to the board over XLR.
The board itself may be digital. That seems to be getting more common. But the inputs are all analog afaik? I’ve seen more exotic setups at recording studios but not on stage. Then again, we are not exactly a big act! lol
The size of the internal wire, solder connection, strain relief, and especially the cable shield size are all factors.
The shield is most critical if you look at the length of wire an miniscule power of any instrument without a powered preamp. Even with a built in preamp the output impedance will be high from most circuits.
Think of it this way, high impedance is another way of saying there is a voltage signal but not much current is able to flow to or from the device. If you try to pull or push too much current the signal will disappear. When there is not much current flowing, the signal is much more susceptible to other signals and noise crossing the wire.
Most 3.5mm audio connectors have poor shielding, strain relief, and the actual connection points where the wires are soldered are terrible. With the way they are constructed, the solder connection must be done very quickly to avoid damaging the thin plastic insulation between the rings that make up the tip terminal. With the larger quarter inch connector, there is a lot more heat mass in the actual terminals and there is enough room to make solder terminals with heat isolation. This helps to match the terminal with a larger wire gage so that both surfaces can evenly wet with solder with a properly set iron temperature. In theory this leads to a far more robust connection.
Most 3.5mm cables are unshielded. This is fine for the low impedance (high current flow) of an amplifier output stage, but it is totally insufficient for the high impedance input of an instrument.
This is why instrument cables generally cost so much more too. You’re buying more copper, an engineered cable that has more that just wires in an extruded plastic sleeve, and the connectors are special purpose, beefier, and more engineered for a specialty task.
I looked at the list… It seems that almost all of them are mid/low budget phones, while high end phones rarely come with a jack. As much as it pains me to say it, it makes sense, since people who buy expensive phones probably can afford a wireless set while people who buy budget phones are less likely to buy wireless headphones.
And you’d wrong again, because all mayor manufacturers offer affordable wireless headphones as well. You can get a decent pair for as low as $20 and great wireless headphones with active noise cancelling for $50.
Most wireless earbuds will become useless bricks since they are designed to be really hard to repair and batteries degrade with charge cycles. So while you can get an earbud on a budget, they will need to be replaced much more frequently than a wired pair of earbuds at the same price.
I got mine pre-covid in 2019 for 30 bucks and they still hold over 4 hours playback time on a single charge and around 4-5 full charges in the charger box.
I’m glad you have had a good experience with yours, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. I’ve been using the same pair of wired earbuds for 18 years (2004-2022), not being careful at all with them… They went through countless times in the laundry machine during my teenage years when I forgot them in the pocket and never had a problem… While both pairs of wireless earbuds I have had died within less than 18 months when I was careful with them.
That’s why I won’t be buying wireless junk. Even if they are cheaper than they used to be, they are less reliable and become ewaste quickly due to their hard to repair designs.
The only pair of repairable earbuds I am aware of are the galaxy buds live (the ones that look like kidney beans), but they don’t stay in my ear, so I didn’t buy it.
I’m using heaphones made for the best audio quality, i use a quarter jack to my audio card or, for my phone, just add an adapter to 3.5.
But my phone is getting old, is it possible to keep a good audio quality, and the heaphones wich sound i like, but through bluetooth?
Because i’ve never experienced any good bluetooth converter, and neither did i found any good bluetooth headphones, and let’s be honest i kinda don’t want to buy a new expensive one after getting mine wich was already pretty expensive…
My $200 bluetooth earbuds are adequate at best but in no way compare to my Sony wired studio monitors that cost half the price. I paid for wireless for work calls hands free.
They wireless is nice for a quick walk to the grocery store or something outside, but if I am wanting to really listen to music I plug in.
You want a bluetooth DAC. FiiO makes some decent ones. Only downside might be audio latency, but the quality should be there for budget audiophile headphones like the HD6XX
That won’t give good quality because the phone sending the signal to the DAC is sending a poor quality signal. Sending a poor quality signal to a high quality DAC won’t give you good audio.
However, all OP needs is just going to be a usb-c to 3.5mm audio jack to plug his headphones into. It will have pinouts for analog signal within the USB-C (USB c standard is specd to include analog stereo).
The issue still remains that most phones have a lower quality DAC. Ones that are only good enough to provide good quality for bluetooth devices. The last phone line I know of that had a really good DAC built in there the LG V series phones (v20, v30, v40, v50).
How exactly would it be poor quality? You do understand that there are multiple codecs to choose from using Bluetooth, right? The codec impacts both quality and latency. Also, Bluetooth is a digital signal. The signal either gets sent or it doesn’t, so whether the signal is “quality” should not matter.
Audio latency isn’t a priority for me, and since you mentioned it i’ve looked into the codec available (both on the phone i want and the dac) and it seems like FiiO is a very good option.
honestly, i had completely forgotten that some phones, for some completely unfathomable reason, lack an audio jack of any kind. if you are suffering through that, you have my condolences.
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