And you're inventing a problem. Your cables will still do everything you expected them to do when you purchased them.
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Apple Preparing HD Audio Playback for iOS 8 Alongside New In-Ear Headphones and Lightning Cable
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And you're inventing a problem. Your cables will still do everything you expected them to do when you purchased them.
I'm looking to buy the beyerdynamic DT 880 600 ohm headphones. These are "mid-range" headphones at $400.
They require 600 ohms. An iPhone or even a Android phone isn't going to cut it. They simply don't have the juice the power the headphone without a headphone AMP.
I'd have to jury rig a lightning to micro USB to USB DAC adapter. Then duct tape it to any smartphone I want if I want to use those headphones.
Basically like this
As you can see, not very elegant.
I can see the lightning solving this for mid-range headphones. Or someone comes out with an integrated DAC/headphone amplifier on one end lighting and 3.5 end for the higher OHM rated studio mid-range headphones.
fortysomegeek,
This why why this rumor may be more Apple allowing makers of external headphone amps to directly connect to the Lightning port, which will allow the external headphone amplifier to decode high-resolution digital media streams (e.g., the rumored 24-bit 96 kHz sampling rate Apple Lossless files) and have playback controls on the headphone amp itself. This will allow driving of "big can" over-ear headphones like AKG and Sennheiser models (or even the classic Koss Pro4AA) or difficult to drive higher-end in-ear headphones from the likes of Shure, Etymotics, or Logitech/Ultimate Ears.
This why why this rumor may be more Apple allowing makers of external headphone amps to directly connect to the Lightning port, which will allow the external headphone amplifier to decode high-resolution digital media streams (e.g., the rumored 24-bit 96 kHz sampling rate Apple Lossless files) and have playback controls on the headphone amp itself. This will allow driving of "big can" over-ear headphones like AKG and Sennheiser models (or even the classic Koss Pro4AA) or difficult to drive higher-end in-ear headphones from the likes of Shure, Etymotics, or Logitech/Ultimate Ears.
What about lossless?
I find it so humorous to hear Apple talking about exceeding 16-bit/48K audio quality, when most of the music is actually in the form of highly compressed mp4 files. I can typically hear the difference of even a 256Kbit MP4 even on mediocre headphones and speakers. Entire sections of the song typically drop out because the dynamic range was considered too high.
If people care about audio quality again, how about just making uncompressed audio more common, like it was back in the 80s when we had compact disks? Or is 176KB/second too taxing for modern hardware?
I find it so humorous to hear Apple talking about exceeding 16-bit/48K audio quality, when most of the music is actually in the form of highly compressed mp4 files. I can typically hear the difference of even a 256Kbit MP4 even on mediocre headphones and speakers. Entire sections of the song typically drop out because the dynamic range was considered too high.
If people care about audio quality again, how about just making uncompressed audio more common, like it was back in the 80s when we had compact disks? Or is 176KB/second too taxing for modern hardware?
Err. The Mac has been capable of far more for a long time dude.
Attachments
Yeah, know all about that, dude. Been doing it for years via Toslink output. However, the question was about iTunes music, which, as I understand, is 16 bit/44.1 kHz. So, any 24-bit audio coming from Apple's iTunes Store?