How to choose digital decoding headphones

At present, many people’s understanding of digital decoding earphones is not particularly clear. Today, I will introduce digital decoding earphones. As the name suggests, digital earphones are earphone products that use digital interfaces to directly link. Similar to the most common portable earbuds and earphones, except that the 3.5mm interface is no longer used, but the data cable interface of the mobile phone is used as the interface of the earphone, such as the Type C interface of Android devices or the Lightning interface used by IOS devices.

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A digital headset is a headset designed with a digital signal interface (such as the Lightning interface of the iPhone, the Type C interface on the Android phone, etc.). The 3.5mm, 6.3mm and XLR balanced interface headphones we usually use are all traditional analog signal interfaces. The built-in DAC (decoder chip) and amplifier of the mobile phone convert the digital signal into an analog signal that can be recognized by the human ear, and after amplification processing, it is output to the earphone, and we hear the sound.

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Digital earphones come with their own DAC and amplifier, which can play ultra-high bit rate lossless music, while mobile phones only output digital signals and supply power, and the earphones directly decode and amplify signals. Of course, it is definitely more than that, the next thing is the key point. At present, except some Chinese HiFi mobile phones, other smart phones only support 16bit/44.1kHz audio format (traditional CD standard) in terms of audio decoding. Digital earphones are different. It can support audio formats with higher bit rates such as 24bit/192kHz and DSD, and present high-quality audio effects. The Lightning interface can directly provide pure digital signals to the earphones, and maintaining digital signals can help reduce crosstalk interference, distortion and background noise. So you should see that digital headphones can fundamentally improve the sound quality, not just replace a port and make the phone thinner and better looking.
Has the concept of digital earphones existed before? If you look at the concept of digital earphones “transmitting digital signals”, there are still some, and there are quite a few. It is a variety of mid-to-high-end gaming headsets. These headset products use the USB interface to directly connect to the computer. The reason for this design is that the headset can use its built-in USB sound card no matter how the player changes the computer or switches between the Internet cafe and the home. To bring users a constant sound performance, and better than the computer integrated sound card performance. But this kind of digital headset is actually very functionally targeted-just for games.

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For traditional headphones, digital headphones still have many advantages, but these advantages must also come from the support of interface-related functions of smart portable device manufacturers. For current IOS devices, Apple’s closed design makes the standard change. To be more uniform, and for Android, because of the different hardware itself, the support for audio devices is not the same.

Digital earphones can support 24bit audio file format. Smart devices only output digitally to digital earphone devices. The built-in decoder of earphones directly decodes high-bit-rate music formats, bringing better sound performance to users.

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Post time: Apr-15-2023