this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
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The headphone wire also serves as a FM radio antenna. You can't get that with wireless headphones or a connection via the USB jack.
I haven’t listened to FM radio in probably 8-9 years. It’s literally nothing but ads with a few minutes of the most commercial music shoved down your throat 12 times a day
You don’t have community radio where you’re at?
On AM stations yeah. Not FM though.
AM is a while different beast, and there aren’t any phones with AM receivers.
Oh bummer. I’ve got 2 good community stations plus CBC on FM in my area
I agree that most radio stations are shite. Fortunately, I live in Ireland, which still has publicly funded broadcasters. I have my phone permanently tuned to Lyric FM, which plays classical music with almost no commercials.
I think they're joking about earbud wires catching AM radio signals and giving spooky whispers
I don’t think they’re joking at all… what they said is true. If the phone has an FM receiver then the wired headphones do serve as the antenna for it. It will not work without wired headphones.
Back in the day that was a good way to have free music over the air if you didn’t have an unlimited data plan, which most people didn’t.
It’s just obsolete tech now. Having a headphone jack doesn’t mean anything if the phone doesn’t have an FM receiver. Most phones don’t have an FM chip in them anymore.
It means I can connect my phone to my car stereo without a bunch of fucking dongles.
My current phone is Samsung XCover 4. It's a fairly newish rugged phone; still has a FM receiver.
They just said it can't be recreated with USB which you can definitely do
No you can’t… at least not easily or cost effectively.
It’s not just the wire on the headphones, it’s how an analog jack works. A 3.5mm audio jack routes raw analog signal through a direct electrical connection. USB doesn’t not. Without the raw analog signal, the FM receiver can’t do anything with it.
You need extra hardware like an analog pass through to get USB to handle analog radio signals. And that’s expensive and bulky for no benefit over an audio jack which is compact and dirt cheap.
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about here.
Sounds like I can do it with a chain of ten different adapters. Sold!
I'm not disagreeing that the FM radio circuit being directly connected to the trs connector is how phones worked for decades, I'm just saying that they said you couldn't get FM radio over usb, so I assumed they must not be talking about literally receiving FM radio to the computer because obviously you can use SDR over usb. Maybe I'm just too autistic to appreciate what they were trying to say, but the interpretation I had from their comment was that killing TRS removed the ability for your phone to receive radio even including over usb, which is demonstrably wrong. But yes, your phone receiving the raw analogue signal through the TRS connector and using its dedicated radio circuit is in fact a thing, and almost certainly the better way to do it.
My Motorola has an FM receiver app. You can scan and save your favorite stations and save them separately for different cities. You can even record audio. I've used it in places where reception sucks for streaming from my home server. And if you don't want to use the headphones, you can switch to speaker or BT and still use the wire as an antenna.