According to pocketnow testing this adapter cuts everything to only 16bit, seems 6s is better
I find it hilarious when people know just enough to make public fools of themselves...
He wants more shielding in the cable? Why does that little stub need to be shielded better than the long wire up to the headphones? Has he seen the
shielding on those lines in the iPhone 6s? There isn't any-- it's a flat ribbon for the analog path from the DAC, past all the rest of the noisy components in the phone, and to the jack.
"That's all just [faux] geeky griping about cables and connectors."
There isn't much space for the DAC and amp? Has he looked at the
internals of the iPhone 6s? It's no bigger... Use the bypass caps around the IC for scale.
Your headphones do typically have 4 signals, one of which is the return, sometimes called "ground". It also functions as the shield and is typically connected to the braid on the cable and the outer shield on the device. It is there because voltages need to be measured against something, and that return is what the voltages are measured against.
It is not true ground, because the phone is in your pocket and you're probably wearing shoes and standing on cement, asphalt, wood, or something else that isn't salt water. It is not protecting you from being electrocuted by your headphones. Your headphones have something less than half a volt across them-- not really enough to make you twitch when you have a skin resistance of a couple kOhms. And since the voltage is floating anyway, because it's all battery powered, the whole statement is just layered in absurdities...
The iPhone is not sending those 4 connections to the lightning port. It is sending a digital serial signal to the lightning port, and the adapter is creating those 4 from it. Instead of going from digital to those 4 inside the phone, it now does it outside the phone.
I have no idea what it means to say the phone will play 24 or 32 bit files but that the output will be cut back down to 16 bit. The DAC determines what can be played. Does he just mean that you can store 32bit audio on the phone and transcode it to 16bit to send to the DAC? How is that different from the 6s? To "play" a 32bit file, you need to be able to store it, read it, and convert it-- nothing with a 16 bit DAC can play a 32bit file...
He then goes on to compare a single sample of the iPhone 7 with a single sample of the 6s, says that the differences are imperceptible, and continues to whine that the iPhone 7 is somehow worse. His chart shows 2dB higher noise levels, down at -100dBA.
0dBA is the limit human perception, and 3dB is what's barely perceptible. So it's 100dB below audible to begin with and then below the just noticeable difference. On the other hand, the chart he's showing says the iPhone 7 reduces stereo cross talk by 8dB (not dBA)-- granted 80dB below the direct sound is pretty weak, as a measure of "error" the cross talk swamps the random noise and is probably closer to the level of perception. I'd call these two outputs pretty much the same psychoacoustically, and if I had to make a call scientifically on the numbers, I'd give the win to the iPhone 7 adapter. Because he doesn't understand the numbers, he says it got worse.
He says this move means that this is creating a future where if you want to hear the full scope and dynamic range of your high quality audio files, you're going to have to buy headphones that have their own DAC and amp built in to them-- which is also the past because he just said that the quality of the 6s is no better...
But you know, the LG 32bit (a measure of dynamic range) DAC can generate frequencies of sounds that dogs can't even hear-- and that's important.
And then, after all of this misinformation and lack of understanding of how this stuff works, he says that Apple is hiding behind misinformation and a general lack of understanding of how this stuff works...
So, having started his review wishing the adapter was longer, it turns out Apple gave him an adapter just long enough to hang himself with.
