

It came into prominence with the first Sony Walkman, which was introduced in 1979. In fact, this type of audio jack was basically universal.
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It’s unclear if the creation of the earphone feature was motivated by the desire to listen to the radio after bedtime, or avoid aggravating the Mrs with the play-by-play of the baseball game.Īn old school portable music player, like an iPod or my Sansa MP3 player, had a single 3.5mm 3-conductor jack. It was also called a “mini-jack” since stereo headphones for listening to music used the full-sized, 1/4” phone plug. This was intended to receive an earphone for private listening. When Sony got around to it some transistor radios featured a 3.5mm (1/8”) 2-conductor jack. In the beginning there was the pocket transistor radio. What I’m describing relates to the various ways in which the common headset connector has been used over time and across a number of application contexts, including: I thought it worth sharing some of the things that I’ve noted along the way, along with just a bit of the history.

A recent project has me dealing with some wired headsets. Prior to smart phones life was much simpler…at least with respect to the wiring for headsets used with portable music players vs cell phones.
