You must have met a Spinoza or two. They are easily recognisable by the angle of their noses and gushings about first pressings. Mercifully, their numbers are small and, I’d like to think, dwindling. For most people who love music, much of the listening happens on smartphones with headphones on streaming platforms such as Gaana (owned by the group that owns this publication), JioSaavn, Spotify, and Apple Music.
With phones nowadays becoming thinner and sleeker, most of them, frustratingly, don’t have conventional jacks to plug in your headphones. Increasingly, people use wireless headphones that rely on Bluetooth technology to connect to phones. That is a problem.
You don’t have to be a Spinoza to realise that wireless headphones can sound worse than wired ones. Bluetooth uses ‘codecs’, a process that compresses and decompresses audio files to transmit them wirelessly. Most codecs make the sound lose quality. Wired headphones don’t use codecs and so they sound less ‘lossy’.
What do you do though if, like mine, your phone doesn’t have a jack to plug in your favourite wired headphones. For several years, I was forced to use Bluetooth headphones, some of which were cheap, but also a few expensive ones. Regardless of how much they cost, they mostly sucked – and not only because they compressed the sound.
The biggest cost component of wireless headphones is Bluetooth connectivity or the wireless receivers that they use, and they can be expensive. Wireless headphones also use expensive lithium-ion batteries. Because of these costs, most brands skimp on drivers, the tiny speakers that actually produce sound. Wired headphones don’t need wireless receivers or batteries. So, their makers can spend more on drivers, which come in varying types. The most affordable ones are dynamic drivers. But better (and more expensive) ones are planar magnetic, electrostatic, and balanced armature. Without getting too geeky, here is the thing: wired headphones are better than wireless headphones, regardless of what you’re listening to: the intentional imperfections of lo-fi garage band Guided By Voices, or the meticulously crafted hi-fi electronica of Daft Punk. After years spent in Bluetooth haze, when I decided to get wired again, I had a problem. My phone had no slot to plug in headphones. There were adapters available to get around that hurdle. But mostly they were cumbersome, flimsy and broke easily.
Like wireless headphones, the costliest components in smartphones are their internal flash memory, the display, the processor, and the camera, none of which have anything to do with how they sound. So, most phone-makers use cheap amplifiers and components that convert digital signals to audio sounds (known as digital-to-analog convertors, or DACs). Add to that the compressed files that digital platforms serve up, and the experience of streaming music on your phone can be quite underwhelming.
That’s when I met my new appendage, the portable DAC dongle. A tiny gizmo, not unlike an USB pen-drive, the DAC dongle has two functions: it acts as an adapter that hooks up wired headphones to jackless phones, but also has a digital-to-audio converter and an amplifier that is way better than what your smartphone has.
You can get different types of DACs — portable ones, big ones, expensive ones, or cheap ones. I got a portable one for a couple thousand rupees, and no matter what music I’m streaming, it sounds way better. My new appendage is a dongle. Yes, I know how that sounds. But I don’t care.
