Can I use my regular 3.5 mm earphones with an iPhone?

Question

The earphones that I have received with my iPhone have 4 metal connector jack. By the size of it, it looks 3.5 mm in diameter. Unfortunately, the white earphones are not of the in-ear type and slip out from my ears quite frequently.

I have a different set of Sony earphones with a 3.5 mm jack. It has 3 metal connectors which means that if I insert it in the iPhone, at least I am shorting out 2 metals receptors on the iPhone female. Is it fine to do such a thing? My guess is that if the short is occurring between the mic and the ground, it should be fine as usually not a lot of current is sourced to a mic. I was just looking around for more information. A connection diagram would be great.

Answer 1

Yes, you can use any earphones with a 3.5mm audio jack. I'm surprised you did not just try it out :)

I thought I'd add some additional background information I just read about in a report on yet another Apple-Samsung patent case, Apple holds a patent on an audio jack which has the circuitry to detect the type of headphones plugged in, and I can only assume this is what they actually use in their iPhones.

Answer 2

Some earphones are not supported by iphone... I've try some earphones but the bass of the music didn't exist.. So i prefer to use apple earphones ^^

Answer 3

Yeah. All the headphones that you have are 3.5mm but if you can look closely, the white one has 3 black strips a.k.a. the 4-conductor TRRS while the Sony one has 2 black strips a.k.a. the 3-conductor TRRS. So, the iPhone only supports those headphones with the 4-conductor, for example, the Beats headphones.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)