to add to this answer, those 24 pins would have to be aligned correctly.
so, you’d have this problem, but worse because because it’s round and not basically flat:
Comment on What happened to cylindrical plugs?
Shadow@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Usb c has 24 pins. A typical barrel / stereo style jack has 2 - 4. The connector would have to be absolutely huge to carry the number of wires.
Power plugs are similar problems. You can’t risk the pins crossing over each other and shorting out. You don’t care about that on your headphones due to the low voltages. Wall plugs need to be fully isolated and safe.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Docus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Cordless kettles manage to connect mains power with a round, freely turning connector, so it can be done safely
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 2 days ago
Well, those ones does it at the cost of size. In order to ensure separation they are comparatively huge.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
power plug with 3 wires or 5 wires (3-phase) could be made safe-ish if there was a button at the very end that connected to a relay or something. but plug like this would be comically long for any practical power
scheep@lemmy.world 2 days ago
oh yeah usb has loads of pins for data. no wonder barrel jacks were never used to transfer data…
oh yeah designing an idiot-proof power plug that can be rotated 360 degrees would be challenging ad well
Thorry84@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Round connectors were absolutely used to transfer data, for example audio and video in the form of RCA plugs and many other examples back in the day. Another example is coax cable for TV signals (both analog and digital) and also LAN.
However the lack of distinct interface channels leads to a bottleneck in bandwidth. So as the need for bandwidth increased many of those were replaced with multi pin versions. This is much harder to do with round connectors and there isn’t that much benefit, so they mostly got ditched.
However round connectors still have their place, for example tiny little coax connectors found in many devices to carry signals. Wifi antennas and such are connected this way.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Coax has only 2 conductors and it keeps impedance constant, unlike audio jack
scheep@lemmy.world 1 day ago
oh cool
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh you sweet summer child. As someone who bridged the gap between analog and digital sensing systems, I assure you, they were. I think it would be hard for almost anyone who grew up/ technically developed in the all digital age to believe some of the wack-ass shit we used to do to make things work. I had a technical career in the military in the period of transition from basically hybrid analog/ digital systems, to mostly digital systems. There were PLENTY of systems that used something not any more complicated than a barrel jack for doing so. Power, communications, you name it. But these were very simple systems relative to what we do now. And the reason why matched your thinking throughout this post. They are incredibly robust, simple connectors. They can rotate without issue. They are incredibly common and can be widely versatile. They are basically bullet proof, and if need be, I could solder in a jumper or just pinch a couple wires together holding my fingers to make it work if the cable were to fail.
IIRC, and I’m long in the tooth so it might be a bit muddled, I remember it taking almost 2 days for one computer system to warm up (to quite literally warm up physically to temperature and become stable), and when we had to load the operating system, we used reel to reel digital audio tape. You quite literally had to manually move the tape back and forth to find the start byte sequence. And that system used a headphone jack to give you a digital output display (not entirely; the computer and display system for had to do the analog to digital conversion).
scheep@lemmy.world 1 day ago
oh interesting
CameronDev@programming.dev 2 days ago
The 3rd gen iPod shuffles used the headphone port for USB, definitely uncommon though.