Oliver Haslam·

Details On Using High-Impedance Headphones With New MacBook Pros Shared By Apple

Apple has today shared more information on the new MacBook Pros and their headphone jack, saying that they feature “DC load detection and adaptive voltage output.”

That means that the headphone jack will be able to handle headphones that some other machines wouldn’t be able to drive, including the kinds of monitoring headphones that professionals would use.

In a new support document from Apple, we’re told:

The 3.5 mm headphone jack on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) or MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) features DC load detection and adaptive voltage output. Your Mac can detect the impedance of the connected device and will adapt its output for low- and high-impedance headphones, as well as for line-level audio devices.

When you connect headphones with an impedance of less than 150 ohms, the headphone jack provides up to 1.25 volts RMS. For headphones with an impedance of 150 to 1k ohms, the headphone jack delivers 3 volts RMS. This may remove the need for an external headphone amplifier.

With impedance detection, adaptive voltage output, and a built-in digital-to-analog converter that supports sample rates of up to 96 kHz, you can enjoy high-fidelity, full-resolution audio directly from the headphone jack on your MacBook Pro.

While Apple touts the speaker array in these new machines as being the best yet, listening via headphones is still the way to go. People creating video and music will always want to use headphones and this new headphone jack is perfect for connecting to some of the best headphones around.

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