Headphones: is the USB connection or the traditional jack better?

If you have a set of wired headphones that allow you to connect to a computer via a USB connection or the traditional jack, you may be wondering what the real difference is between using these two port options. It is undoubtedly a big question. That said, which one should you use?

Headphones: is the USB connection or the traditional jack better?

Use the traditional jack

If you connect the headphones to the computer (or any device with a headphone jack) using traditional analog cable, the headphones function like traditional analog headphones. In other words, an electrical signal travels down the wire to the headphones and moves the speaker cone using electromagnetism to reproduce sound.

This means that your device’s sound card is completely responsible for the quality of the signal that goes to the headphones. If you have a great sound card with the right level of amplification, your headphones will reach their full potential and sound the best possible. On the other hand, if you plug them into a headphone jack on a device with poor audio quality, it doesn’t matter how good the headphones are. The sound will be as bad as the signal.

Headphone manufacturers include analog headphone jacks in modern headphones because there are many devices (good and bad) in the world that use this connection standard. However, I would say that in almost all cases where you can choose between using the headphone jack connection or the USB connection, the USB connection should almost always be the option chosen.

Using the USB connection

If you use the USB connection on headphones that offer it, you will usually have some tangible benefits. Firstly, it is not dependent on your device’s sound hardware. The headphones actually contain a sound card, so they are an independent sound device. This means you will hear exactly the sound quality intended by the headphone manufacturers.

This also means that you are using the amplifier built into the headphones, powered by the USB port. So the headphone speaker drivers are receiving exactly the amount of power and amplification they were designed for.

In many cases, when using headphones via USB, you will also have the advantage of being able to control the volume or skip tracks on the headphones. USB cables can also be quite long without any loss of quality and, unless you have a serious grounding problem, you will also be isolated from interference that may appear as hiss or crackle on an analogue connection. Using the USB connection can also enable certain features that require power, such as active noise cancellation, microphone noise cancellation, or spatial audio.

In short, using the USB connection allows the headphones to work as the designers intended, and assuming they did a good job, you’re getting the best the headphones can offer.

What about wireless headphones?

Many wireless headphones offer a wired analog connection. However, some may even offer a USB connection, although this may only offer charging functionality and not any type of audio functionality. If yours offers audio over USB, it’s likely still the best option. But if your Bluetooth headphones only offer a wired analog connection, it’s not as bad an option as purely wired headphones.

Now you know the reason to use USB headphones instead of the traditional jack.