Quieting headphone pop: Would it work to put a discharge resistor in a custom dongle?
I'm also wondering if I could implement the proposed solution — wiring a ~100Ω resistor from line to ground — in an external dongle I would place inline between my headphone cord and my audio source device.


You've missed the grand fallacy of this idea: there is already a much more significant 8 to 32 Ω across the output if the headphones are already plugged in. The 1000 Ω in parallel won't make any difference.







simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab

Figure 1. The problem this time is that the amplifier or pre-amplifier is being enabled in the device hardware.

On turn-on the amplifier output jumps to V+/2 and so does the right side of C1 until discharged by the speaker. The pulse is what you hear.

Sorry, I don't have a solution for you.