How do wireless headphones work?
In: Engineering
Same as everything else that is wireless, electromagnetic transmission of signals.
But my comment is probably deemed “too short” and removed, as usual.
You plug a transmitter into your computer (that’s the part that goes in the USB port).
This transmitter picks a specific radio frequency for communicating with a transmitter inside the headset. A portion of radio wave frequencies are set aside for this purpose, by law. The computer sends signals to the headset to confirm that it is there and what its status is. Once this is done, the computer can “talk” to the headset and tell it what sounds to produce, just like if the signal had been sent down a metal wire.
As long as the headset still has power, it can receive the radio signals and produce sound as instructed by the computer.
I could say it depends, but most of the time, it will work like this:
The track is stored in digital format, the data in that digital format is sent from an emitter to a receiver in the headphones. The mitter could be the bluetooth chip in your phone, a dongle plugged in a USB port and so on.
There is a chip in the headphones called a DAC. That stands for digital to analog converter. It takes the data it receives in digital format and converts it in an analog format. That signal is sent to the drivers in the headphones (the part that actually makes the sound) and the sounds are then played. The actual electronics doing all that are a bit more complicated, but I kept it simple.
Technically, you could send everything in analog format, that’s what AM and FM radio are which removes the need for converting analog sound to digital, then back from digital to analog. However, that would require all analog media. So basically, analog music storage (i.e. old school vinyl discs), an analog transmitter, and receiver in the headphones. That’s not really something you’ll see today.
CDs, music files on phones and computers are all in digital format.
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