It seemed I made a dumb mistake by acting in haste. I got a good deal on a set of Razer wired earbuds so as to have better sound quality when playing audio from my phone, but I didn’t read closely enough before pulling the trigger.
When I received them I found that they were ios phones and meant for an I-Phone and have a “lightning” connector, and not the regular 3.5mm make jack I need for my android phone.
An hour or more in vain has netted me exactly zilch in my search for an adapter that allows me to use these earbuds with my phone. Plenty of Lightning to female 3.5mm adapters, but no lightning to 3.5mm male adapters.
Anybody know any other way around this? I don’t think I can just return these since I bought them on one of those “Woot!” deals.
I believe the headphones with a lightning plug are digital and have a D/A converter in the plug which requires power to operate. Since analog over a 3.5mm plug doesn’t supply separate power, there is no way an unpowered adapter would work.
Lightning audio devices are a bit special. Lightning is a pin driver - depending on what it connects to the host can drive the pins in different ways. So it can emulate USB if needed, but other interfaces as well. So this means that Lightning can do interesting things. Which may include directly interfacing to a device with a lower level protocol. Apple doesn’t release information on what happens here. It isn’t impossible that the audio device interface isn’t just I2S. It would avoid a lot of extra junk in the way that just hinders performance. Apple’s own Lightning to 3.5mm adapter has extraordinarily good performance, and all the more so because of its tiny price
But that isn’t much help here. Overall it is very unlikely there is a suitable adapter available.
While I would not recommend the OP doing this themselves, I do wonder if actual digital-audio converter (DAC) is in the plug. If so, then the audio would be analog up to the plug, and I wonder if you could cut off the DAC and replace the end plug with an analog one.
From what I can tell, Woot is owned by Amazon and takes returns. They may also have a 3.5mm version of the item for an exchange. Much easier than trying to make the square peg fit the round hole.
