I'm crossposting from my system description thread the following to this new thread. I thought others might want to chime in with their experiences about how best to drive headphones more or less directly from a recent iPad, one lacking a stereo mini jack, having only a Lightning or USB-C jack:
********************
For a good while now, since I further simplified my main stereo room system to eliminate the Benchmark DAC3 HGC and Benchmark HPA4 headphone amp, I have not used headphones in that system, limiting my headphone listening to my computer desk system used primarily for video streaming.
Recently, however, I have added back headphone listening capability to my stereo room system. While I still don't have a means of using my best headphones, the Stax SR009S, in that system, I have now arranged things so that I can use either my Apple AirPods Max or NAD Viso HP-50 in my stereo room system.
Since the Apple AirPods Max are ordinarily connected via Bluetooth, to listen via these headphones in that system I simply turn on the Bluetooth capability of my M-1-based iPad Pro (2021)'s system controller and pair the headphones with the iPad. Since the Bluetooth connection seems limited to a 24 bit, 48 kHz sampling rate, this may impair the sonic quality heard from High Resolution program material a bit, but my D&D 8c speakers impose a similar "limitation" since the DACs in those speakers are intentionally set up by the manufacturer to operate at 24/48, both to allow the chosen DACs to operate more precisely and to avoid energizing the 27 kHz peak in the response of the tweeter of the speakers.
I acquired a second pair of the NAD Viso HP-50 headphones to use in the stereo room system so I don't have to move my first pair back and forth between the computer system and the stereo room system. To use the even better NAD Viso HP-50 headphones in my stereo room, I needed an adaptor to fit the wired NAD headphones to the USB-C jack which is the only wired output on the iPad Pro. While iMac computers still have stereo mini jacks for driving ordinary wired headphones, there is no stereo mini jack on recent iPads or iPhones.
Fortunately, Apple and others make a simple, one-piece USB-C to stereo mini jack adaptor. See this link. The standard 4-foot-long cord of the NAD phones, which terminates in a stereo mini-plug fits right into the stereo mini-jack of this adaptor and the male USB-C end of the adaptor fits into the USB-C jack of the iPad Pro.
One way to listen to streamed material through headphones in this system involved enabling the iPad Pro to be a Roon end point device. To do this and avoid simultaneously driving the speakers, I first simply disable my Lumin X1 as an end point device through Roon's controls; go to Roon's Menu > Settings > Audio, then click on the gear icon next to the Lumin X1 and select Disable. Then I enable the Apple iPad Pro as a Roon end point. In the Roon set up of the iPad Pro, I enable the MQA Core Decoder to make sure that my Roon Nucleus+ does the core decoding of any MQA programs before sending them to the iPad through my home network. I set the iPad Pro to "Renderer only" for this set up since iPads have no inherent MQA decoding capability.
When I go back to speaker listening, I then re-Enable the Lumin X1 as a Roon end point and Disable the iPad Pro. You don't have to do that, but I like to keep the system set-up as unambiguous as possible.
Alternatively, I can listen by headphones in my stereo room by simply streaming directly from apps on the iPad Pro, bypassing Roon, the Nucleus+, and of course the Lumin X1. I have apps for most of my usual streaming sources on the iPad Pro: various internet radio stations and aggregating services, Safari, YouTube, Internet Concert Archive, Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, SiriusXM, etc. While I cannot access my own CD-derived music files this way, most of those programs are available as streaming files through Tidal or Qobuz, albeit in FLAC rather than WAV format. I also obviously can't avail myself of the superior Roon GUI this way.
********************
For a good while now, since I further simplified my main stereo room system to eliminate the Benchmark DAC3 HGC and Benchmark HPA4 headphone amp, I have not used headphones in that system, limiting my headphone listening to my computer desk system used primarily for video streaming.
Recently, however, I have added back headphone listening capability to my stereo room system. While I still don't have a means of using my best headphones, the Stax SR009S, in that system, I have now arranged things so that I can use either my Apple AirPods Max or NAD Viso HP-50 in my stereo room system.
Since the Apple AirPods Max are ordinarily connected via Bluetooth, to listen via these headphones in that system I simply turn on the Bluetooth capability of my M-1-based iPad Pro (2021)'s system controller and pair the headphones with the iPad. Since the Bluetooth connection seems limited to a 24 bit, 48 kHz sampling rate, this may impair the sonic quality heard from High Resolution program material a bit, but my D&D 8c speakers impose a similar "limitation" since the DACs in those speakers are intentionally set up by the manufacturer to operate at 24/48, both to allow the chosen DACs to operate more precisely and to avoid energizing the 27 kHz peak in the response of the tweeter of the speakers.
I acquired a second pair of the NAD Viso HP-50 headphones to use in the stereo room system so I don't have to move my first pair back and forth between the computer system and the stereo room system. To use the even better NAD Viso HP-50 headphones in my stereo room, I needed an adaptor to fit the wired NAD headphones to the USB-C jack which is the only wired output on the iPad Pro. While iMac computers still have stereo mini jacks for driving ordinary wired headphones, there is no stereo mini jack on recent iPads or iPhones.
Fortunately, Apple and others make a simple, one-piece USB-C to stereo mini jack adaptor. See this link. The standard 4-foot-long cord of the NAD phones, which terminates in a stereo mini-plug fits right into the stereo mini-jack of this adaptor and the male USB-C end of the adaptor fits into the USB-C jack of the iPad Pro.
One way to listen to streamed material through headphones in this system involved enabling the iPad Pro to be a Roon end point device. To do this and avoid simultaneously driving the speakers, I first simply disable my Lumin X1 as an end point device through Roon's controls; go to Roon's Menu > Settings > Audio, then click on the gear icon next to the Lumin X1 and select Disable. Then I enable the Apple iPad Pro as a Roon end point. In the Roon set up of the iPad Pro, I enable the MQA Core Decoder to make sure that my Roon Nucleus+ does the core decoding of any MQA programs before sending them to the iPad through my home network. I set the iPad Pro to "Renderer only" for this set up since iPads have no inherent MQA decoding capability.
When I go back to speaker listening, I then re-Enable the Lumin X1 as a Roon end point and Disable the iPad Pro. You don't have to do that, but I like to keep the system set-up as unambiguous as possible.
Alternatively, I can listen by headphones in my stereo room by simply streaming directly from apps on the iPad Pro, bypassing Roon, the Nucleus+, and of course the Lumin X1. I have apps for most of my usual streaming sources on the iPad Pro: various internet radio stations and aggregating services, Safari, YouTube, Internet Concert Archive, Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, SiriusXM, etc. While I cannot access my own CD-derived music files this way, most of those programs are available as streaming files through Tidal or Qobuz, albeit in FLAC rather than WAV format. I also obviously can't avail myself of the superior Roon GUI this way.