When switching amidst a direct connection and the Adapter, there was a slight difference in overall sound quality. The first one we’ve had in our eager hands is Belkin’s $11 Headphone Adapter for iPhone.

The smallest and simplest of the announced adapters, Belkin’s is just by two inches faraway and covered in thick rubber. Plug it into your iPhone’s headphone jack, and you get a standard headphone minijack into which any 1/8-inch stereo miniplug–your run-of-the-mill headphone connector–can be inserted.

As I noted in my article on the iPhone’s compatibility with iPod accessories, the iPhone’s headphone jack is recessed into the iPhone’s body; third-party headphones with larger miniplugs won’t work with that recessed jack.

The solution is a headphone adapter that plugs into that recessed jack and thereupon lets you use your headphones of choice. A number of vendors, including Belkin, Griffin Technology, and Shure have announced such adapters, and we’ll be taking a look at each. The Duo provides sound comparable to the Vibe–which is to say, much better than Apple’s stock earbuds–and uses a miniplug small abundant to fit the iPhone’s headphone jack, so I was able to use the Duo both with and without the Belkin Adapter. I tested the Adapter with V-Moda’s Vibe Duo–an iPhone-focused

(read: includes an inline microphone) version of the company’s excellent Vibe. Every set of headphones I tested worked fine with the Adapter, and the plug end is thin adequate to fit in the headphone-jack gap of every iPhone case we’ve received so far.

The Adapter is fairly rigid, which means you need some clearance at the top of the iPhone for the Adapter and the plug from your headphones. (You can bend the Adapter in the middle, and it bends much more easily after you “break it in” a bit, but you should still assume that you’ll need an inch or so of clearance.) The Adapter’s headphone jack plus fits tightly with most third-party headphone plugs; when you pull on the headphone plug, you’ll likely unplug the adapter instead–which is likely what you want to do anyway.

To reply the obvious question being asked by the audiophiles out there: the Belkin Adapter does affect sound quality, but only slightly. However, the difference was noticeably only in instant, direct comparison and was small decent that only the most golden-eared and picky audiophiles (such as myself) will notice–and even fewer will care.

We’ll be looking at the Griffin and Shure adapters as soon as they reach.

Original post by Dan Frakes

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