These $150 noise-cancelling earbuds almost justify Apple killing the headphone jack

It's been nearly a year since Apple ditched the headphone jack with the iPhone 7, and it's still hard to say how consumers have benefitted.

Things seem to have worked out well for Apple - iPhone users by and large haven't cared about the change, and the company's big push into wireless headphones seems to have made its AirPods earbuds a hit. It doesn't hurt that the company's Beats subsidiary is the top seller of wireless headphones, either.

But the Bluetooth wireless standard remains an imperfect technology - it means another thing to recharge, occasional signal losses, and generally higher prices for the same quality of sound. And those drawbacks continue to dog any company's wireless headphones.

Wires, for all their irksome tangling, still just work.

Thankfully, Apple still has a place for reliable wired audio on every iPhone: the Lightning port, the same thing you use to charge the device. Lightning is a digital connection, too, so it's capable of doing many of the same "smart" tricks the audio world has explored in recent months.

Thus far, though, few companies have really tried to tap into Lightning's potential. It makes sense: Going Lightning means limiting your market to Apple users, and wireless is where most of the industry's growth is.

But now we're finally starting to see some headphones make the case for why iPhone users should want a digital port like Lightning over the old-fashioned analog headphone jack.

Take, for instance, the Pioneer Rayz Plus, a $150 pair of Lightning earphones I've tested for the past few weeks. Though they look like fairly unremarkable on the surface, they use Apple's port to pack a handful of forward-looking features, many of which I'd expect to become standard for earphones of this type.