this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
1188 points (98.3% liked)
memes
23187 readers
2615 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.