The sound coming out of the tiny speakers of the iPad is beyond dire, but slightly less vile on the large-screen model in the iPad Pro range perhaps because there are four speakers and chambers behind them, and maybe there were only two speakers and less volume in chambers on smaller iPads.
I used to use a pair of expensive bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones. I am not sure whether they use some sort of disgusting audio data compression on the link over bluetooth, I don't understand why as the data rate is not that high surely, but I just seem to remember reading some article about something really really nasty. But if that is not the case, there is a chance of decent sound, because the link to the headphones is all digital, and if the headphones are good quality and have superior DACs in them all should be well.
When I compare this to the analog wired output from the ipads things could possibly be a lot worse than using a digital link, if bluetooth does not manage things with compression, because the Apple DACs and headphone amp may be pretty cheap. I just don’t know.
Does anyone have an opinion?
My bluetooth headphones seem to have died. So a while back, my wife lent me her much cheaper wired headphones which I plug straight in. However, the sound is somehow very coloured (in the hi-fi/audio engineering sense of the term) or fuzzy or something is wrong, because I cannot make out some of the dialog in movies or TV programs. I have not tried high quality music yet, from say an uncompressed hugh-res audio file (FLAC ? is it?). It does not strike me as simply reduced audio bandwidth from loss of HF, more like distortion or colouration in the upper midrange.
Does anyone have any experiences of headphones through the wired output?