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from the no-jack-in-the-box^W-phone-for-you dept.
Samsung has a long and illustrious history of trolling Apple in its smartphone commercials. But now the South Korean firm is cloning one of the iPhone features it once mocked, and it has quietly deleted records of the ads.
Samsung unveiled its Note 10 on Wednesday and, as has been widely observed, the phone falls in line with other new devices on the market in that it does not come with a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
[...] Samsung released a memorable advertisement in November 2017 titled "Growing Up." It features an iPhone user through the ages becoming increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his phone. In the end, he caves and buys a Samsung Galaxy. In one section, he ruefully inspects an adapter cable, which enables iPhone users to turn their charging portal into a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Fast forward to 2019 and Note 10 customers may need a similar bit of kit to use wired headphones with their device. And as for that "Growing Up" ad, it has disappeared from some of Samsung's major YouTube channels.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday August 12 2019, @03:36PM (6 children)
Doesn't fix the problem with time lag, which currently makes BT headphones only suitable for listening to pre-recorded sound or video soundtracks (where the video gets delayed to wait for the sound to catch up)... and we're not talking a few ms that only people with golden ears get upset about - the BT delay can be a second or so, so anything 'interactive' is out. Once you start to look beyond simple phones to tablets etc. which are supposed to have serious uses (there's lots of music making software for iOS for instance) that's a bit stupid.
OK, for the moment there's USB-C or Lightning-to-3.5mm adapters... until you want to recharge your phone and you need a dongle/hub...
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 12 2019, @04:14PM (5 children)
Lag is my biggest peeve with standard bluetooth audio, and to the people out there saying "you'll never notice 20ms": go jump off a f'ing cliff. Almost anyone can hear the difference between two audio impulses 2ms apart, if you've got good high frequency hearing you might be able to discern a difference down to 1ms, and even 1ms of lag is really more than we should put up with in audio gear.
Today's digital signal processing is more than capable of sub-millisecond lag end-to-end, what we lack are people who care every step of the way, and there are too damn many layers in the stack filled with people who think it's not a problem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Monday August 12 2019, @04:55PM (4 children)
Those who care about lag are also going to care about how crappy the DACs in the phone are and are not going to want to use those either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:07AM (3 children)
If you've got lag variance between multiple channels, that's a nasty one to fix... the one that bugged me the most recently was trying to watch a video on the tablet using a bluetooth speaker for "better" sound - maybe with all the right software I could manually tune the two to be in sync, but that's not the tap and enjoy "experience" I am looking for - if these things didn't have massive lag built in, you wouldn't need to tweak the picture delay to match the sound.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:08PM (2 children)
The audio video sync issue is a real problem with no quick fix, unless VLC has some setting for audio latency. But it comes back to what I said about having a reference signal to measure the sync issue against. Someone should make a parody commercial about how their Bluetooth device turns all movies into kung fu movies.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
it does, but when the fam is sitting down to enjoy a movie in the cabin of the boat, I'm not really willing to spend 5+ minutes fumbling around the "mobile interface" for VLC to try to find the video delay setting and then tweaking it by feel until I think I've improved the sync, only to be told by the wife "their lips still don't match the sound" 10 minutes into the movie. Much easier to say "that's just how it is, we're going to have to live with it."
I could imagine a photosensor in the bluetooth speakers that would attempt to synchronize flashing video test signals with a click track... not for $20 per speaker anytime soon, but maybe some day...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 13 2019, @07:07PM