Apple LOVE people like you.
You cannot increase the quality of sound through the design of the jack. I know it's been explained before but I'll try myself:
- Audio on an iPhone starts compressed digital audio.
- The audio is then "decompressed", and you get a series of 1's and 0's in raw digital format.
- This data is then fed into a chip known as a DAC (Digital Analogue Converter).
- You can get cheap crappy DAC's or high end expensive DAC's. Apple generally uses higher quality DAC's, although it has been noted the 6S has a poorer quality DAC to the 6. However, having said that, unless your headphones are ultra sensitive, it probably won't bother you.
- The signal that emerges from the DAC is analogue audio.
- This is then fed through an amplifier circuit in the phone, through the 3.5mm jack, to your headphones so you can hear the audio.
Where I've highlighted the text, is where the quality is established.
It has sweet nothing to do with the jack.
Now lets repeat the same journey with a Bluetooth headphone.
- Audio on an iPhone starts compressed digital audio.
- The audio is then "decompressed", and you get a series of 1's and 0's in raw digital format.
- Digital audio is then passed onto the Bluetooth controller on the phone.
- Luckily, Apple supports AptX which offers a much higher quality codec stream, so audio is re-compressed into this format and transmitted over digital radio signals.
- Not all headphones support AptX, so if this happens, the re-compressed audio will lose quality at this step.
- The digital radio signal is then received by the bluetooth headphones.
- The bluetooth controller on the headphones decompresses the audio back into an uncompressed format. If AptX is used, the quality should more or less mirror the original, however if not, there will be loss of sound quality.
- The uncompressed audio is fed through a DAC at this step.
- Once again, you can get cheap crappy DAC's or high end expensive DAC's. I can't imagine generic headphone manufacturers using high end DAC's so unless you have some high-end headphones, there will be another loss of quality in sound.
- The signal that emerges from the DAC is analogue audio.
- This is then fed through an amplifier circuit within the headphones.
- Cheap headphones will have poor isolation of amplifier circuitry so it may add "noise" to the analogue audio.
- The analogue audio is then fed to the speaker drivers so you can hear audio.
Lightning connectors will work in exactly the same way apart from the bluetooth digital radio transmission.
So if you worked it out, you will realise there are more points of audio degradation using Bluetooth or a lightning lead.
It'll also increase costs for headphone manufacturers but since consumers want the same prices as before, they'll sacrifice in quality because generally, "the consumer doesn't really care about quality".
On top of that, Apple will gain huge revenues through the licensing of the proprietary lightning connector and of course headphone manufacturers will pay through the roof to have "Made for iPhone" added to their boxes.
Finally, all the lemmings who blindly follow everything Apple say, will go out and buy a new set of headphones for their phone. Apple makes a big short term gain on revenue.
Ultimately it's a mugs game. In the past, Apple stood for quality.
Now it's just a generic product designed to generate billions in revenue for consumer lemmings.
