24 T3 DECEMBER 2021Horizon
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It’s not about wired
headphones, reader. It
really isn’t. An eagle-eared
listener may be able to tell the
difference between Bluetooth and
hard-line, but they must then
contend with the constant rubbing
of cable on clothes, the ever-
present fear of snagging and
having one’s buds inelegantly
yanked from one’s lugs, the glaring
fact that dangling wires are, in 2021,
dorky as all hell. Besides, a USB-C
DAC is going to output a finer
signal than any headphone jack, if
that’s what you’re really interested
in. It’s not about wired headphones:
it’s about choice.Whenever a feature gets taken
away, particularly if it relates to a
not-quite-dead-yet technology,
people get cross. It happened with
physical phone keyboards, with the
tactile home button, and so on.
Your t ypical puce -faced mouth -
foamer might never actually want
to plug a 3.5mm jack in, but the
fact that they can’t – or that, to doso, they need to spend £9 on an
ungainly adapter – grinds those
guys to the point of apoplexy.
Guru isn’t one of those people.
He tends to roll along the tech ride,
and is happy to embrace whatever’s
next while lovingly side-eyeing his
cherished ZX Spectrum collection.
Guru knows that the reason
headphone jacks are being removed
is a good one: they’re a horrible
point of water ingress, and they
take up room in phone cases which
could be used for more battery or
a thinner shell. Features that
(realistically) don’t matter sacrificed
for those that (arguably) do. That’s
the march of technology.Why do people care about headphone jacks so much?
EMILY, WARWICK
Whenever a feature gets taken
away, particularly if it relates
to a not-quite-dead-yet
technology, people get cross
T3’s tech maestro conducts a new
symphony of informed advice
ABOVE
Next job: look
for that pesky
needle in next
door’s haystack