USB-IF announces USB Audio over USB Type-C standard

[Corky34]

Along with what Peterb said there's also the possibility of smaller water tight devices and as USB carries more than just audio it could be used for more advanced control's/features (e.g:shuffle, EQ, heart rate sensor).

[peterb]

This thread and a couple of other things I've been doing got me thinking about bus communications.

The first printers had an RS232 serial interface running at 1200 baud, and modems were also serial. To increase the printerthroughput, they were fitted with parallel interfaces.

Meanwhile serial rates over the RS232 interface increased as technology and signal processors developed, morphing into the RS 422 variants.

In the disk world the ATA bus was a parallel bus to get the throughput as disk speeds increased. And the fastest of them all was SCSI, spefically designed for small computer systems as a cheaper alternative to main frame busses.

And now we are back to serial interfaces. USB is the standard for printers, ATA morphed into SATA, using the same ATA protocols over a serial bus, and the granddaddy SCSI has become SAS - a serial implementation of the parallel interface protocol.

And all because of advances in modulation techniques and signal processing hardware.

(And this has had wide spread implications beyond the personal computing industry, the CAN bus is widely used in the automotive world (and elsewhere) and serial busses are also to be found in aviation, where the big advantage is the saving of weight and cost)

And of course the one we all love and know, the humble Ethernet over twisted pair cable. Cheap, simple and reliable - when combined with suitable signalling and control protocols.

[ik9000]

The issue here is not wether lots of different data can be carried via 1 small connector - it can and no-one's debating that sfaik. The concern is whether that is better for the end user vs the humble 3.5mm audio jack.

[peterb]

Depends what you mean by 'better'. A universal connector that provides multiple functions may be better than two or more connectors with a single function, particularly if space is limited.

In the short term, it might be 'worse' while people use adapters and so on until the new connector is widely used. But this is no different from when USB was initially introduced. It was first widely used on the original plasticky iMac (which people raved about but IMHO, was plug ugly) - and USB was widely derided then as being a solution looking for a problem.

It's always dangerous predicting the future but I guess in 5 or ten years time USB c and Apple lightening connector will be the two standards. Now the REAL advance would be if those were amalgamated, rather than competing, but that's not going to happen! What is more likely is that the Bluetooth will become the preferred and universal method of listening to music on mobile devices.