Yes - the good splitters mix the pins correctly to provide mono microphone and stereo output in the same jack. You can of course get breakout boxes like the Griffin iMic and have the benefit of a cleaner D/A circuit at the expense of carrying another device that's plugged into USB. Just like everything - some of the expensive products are over priced and some of the cheap ones are worthless. I'd go with a name brand - especially if their products are carried on the Apple Online or stocked in the retail stores.
Lion does add a control where you can select the speaker icon in the menu and switch from input and output.
As to the rationale - unless an engineer from Apple steps up, we'll have to speculate.
Here are the reasons to have fewer ports. (They're not al good, but they are reasons)
- Simplicity - the iPhone / iPad / iPod touch all have one port. Many people don't need or want the confusion of knowing which port they plugged in to their mac. Just as you really appreciate having two, many appreciate having only one stereo jack.
- Internal simplicity - one less switch, one less moving part, several solder points.
- Internal spacing is far more important than external space. If you look at iFixit's excellent take apart manual - you will see there actually isn't room on the logic board for another connector. The design would have to sacrifice an USB port or the SD card slot to make room for a second package without reducing the space for the battery. These macs are packed incredibly tightly and despite the clean appearance of excess external space, inside they are packed like proverbial sardines in a can.
This lack of space likely cuts features from the smaller macs like a redundant mini headphone port.
That TRRS socket actually has of odd configuration of 4 pins so that you can use the genuine Apple headphone/microphone all-in-one 4-pin combo that comes with iPods & iPhones etc. Generally they look like this:
Here is your microphone, right? The Sennheiser ME3. Notice there is a locking ring on that plug? Also, notice how there are two little black lines on the end there? That is the insulation separating the 3 conductive contacts aka 3 pins This is a TRS plug: ( - )( + )(⏚).
It comes with the following caveats:
1. The plug on your microphone has a rotating "locking ring", you have probably found that the microphone isn't working, or works only
sporadically depending on the connection. The issue is that locking
ring prevents the non-standard plug from fully engaging when plugging
into your sound card.
2. Please note that all versions of the Sennheiser ME3 are wired differently than usual headset microphones and are not electrically
compatible with many computer sound cards.
First of all, you're probably going to need something like this:
3. Additional Note: This adapter does not change the unusual wiring scheme used by Sennheiser in the manufacture of the ME3. The ME3 is not compatible with all sound cards. If you are having trouble, we recommend you interface your ME3 with an external USB sound adapter, such as the Andrea Pure Audio (MA) adapter, Buddy 7G or the SpeechWare MultiAdapter.
I don't know what's up with the strange wiring scheme. Maybe it's a stereo microphone, maybe it has something to do with their noise cancellation feature, maybe they use some weird shielding in their cable, maybe they're using balanced cables, maybe they just decided to use an odd wiring scheme and call it a proprietary connector, preventing people from using aftermarket accessories, maybe it was an accident. I can only speculate without digging deeper or seeing a schematic or something. If it were me, I would probably cut the plug off and wire it in a traditional manner. Apparently though, these are compatible with the Sennheiser ME3. They are known as The Andrea Pure Audio USB-SA Adapter & The Andrea Pure Audio USB-MA Adapter, respectively.
If by some miracle you have an ordinary connector, or you find a suitable line-level adapter to make things "normal", you're probably still going to want one of these;
1/8" TRRS male to 1/8" TS female input & 1/8" TRS female adapters:
Yes, it looks and sounds weird. The 4-conductor TRRS plug on this cable uses the CTIA standard configuration, which puts the microphone signal on the sleeve (versus being on the second ring in the OMTP standard). The CTIA standard has always been used by Apple and HTC, while older Samsung, Nokia & Sony Ericsson devices (for instance) initially used the OMTP standard.
Plug the 3.5mm (1/8") male TRRS plug into the audio jack on your laptop.
The smaller of the two 3.5mm (1/8") female jack bodies is the TRS stereo headphone output. Plug your standard earphones, headphones, speakers, or other output device into this jack.
The larger of the two 3.5mm (1/8") female jack bodies is the TS mono microphone input. Plug your (hopefully, now) "standard PC style microphone cable" into this jack.
Best Answer
There were no devices which were designed to filter matching audio into two iOS devices at the same time. The solution I went with in my comment is likely the best.
That is, Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro X both have a feature which will use audio to automatically sync up video tracks. I recorded high quality audio with an external microphone, and using that in conjunction with the audio built into each device, FCP:X was able to create a multi-camera clip with the three audio tracks and two video tracks synced up. I could then select each audio track and each video track independently.