Quote:
Now I'm curious, BlackbeardBen...How would switching the jacks be useful at all? It sounds pretty difficult for minimal (and none that I can think of) usefulness?
Well, now it's too late, but in the design phase it would not have been impossible to add a few transistors or physical switches to do the output/input switching for you. At the very least, a single switch that reversed the positions of the line-out and headphone-out would be cool.
The benefit is so that you can choose the orientation of the player for whatever use you're going to apply it to. Paired with a portable amp that has the headphone-out and line-in at the same end? You can choose whether you want the cables to all come out of the top or the bottom. Using it with a desktop amp? You probably want either the line-out or the coax to be on top so you don't have a wire dangling out the bottom. Using a portable amp with the line-in on the opposite end of the player as the headphone-out and the volume control? You can have the player upright with the front (volume knob/headphone jack on the amp) facing you, because you can move the line-out from the bottom to the top.
Now, I don't remember the exact configuration that it's set at - there was some discussion about the locations of the jacks being changed and I can't remember if the way shown in the renders is final - but no matter what way it is some people aren't going to be happy. For example, if you keep it upside down in your pants pocket (so if you look down it's upright to you) for easy access to the buttons in the same orientation as when you are holding it, you probably want the headphone out to be on the bottom of the X3 (so the cable is coming out of the top of your pocket). If you plan on doing the same with an amp, you'll want the same end for the line out. If you're like me, you'll want the line-out to out of the top to go with your amp (I have an iBasso PB1) with a line-in on the back.
So you can see, there's no way to satisfy everyone regarding output location other than making the jacks all switchable - and this is perhaps the first time we've got a portable player with so many inputs and outputs that something like that would make sense.
Now, I understand that this is a rather bizarre thing to think about doing and there's certainly all sorts of problems to be resolved with something of this sort, but few good ideas are easy to implement.
