Recently I’ve gotten a pair of wired in-ear monitors to avoid wearing bluetooth earphones for long periods of time just in case it contributes to my migraines. I had to use the Apple lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter, and I started wondering if they affected audio quality in any way. Turns out it opens a deep rabbithole into bluetooth vs wired, digital vs analog, DAPs, DACs, ChiFi, 16 bit vs 24 bit, 44khz vs 192khz, etc.
I was never an audiophile and was pretty happy with the original wired earpods that were included with my iphone as it offered a clean sound compared to bass-heavy sounding ones. But I became too curious about whether there’s really a discernible difference between my 192kbps mp3 and a lossless file on a proper audio player. So I’ve gotten my first DAP:
I had to re-rip my existing CDs and now I’m on a nostalgic audio trip.