In our day-to-day life, we might have noticed the variants of earphones based on their jacks, as of now, there are totally three types of earphones with respect to their jacks. Out of those three, two are widely used.
The compatibility of the earphones depends upon the features its jack carries, the body of the jack looks like a tiny pointy tower like structure with fine stripes or rings around it. The stripes might be colored or not, it is purely an aesthetic factor. However, the features of the earphones can be clearly identified with the jacks the earphones have.
Coming to the facts, the TRS (2 rings) and TRRS (3 rings) connectors are standardized formats, some older jacks in audio equipment accept TRS connectors, but have issues with TRRS connectors.
In general, they should both work for the right sized jack (1/8 inch vs 1/4 inch). The terminology of the jack is broke down pictorially, check below,
1 stripe for Mono-Audio,
2 stripes for Stereo-Audio,
3 stripes for Video + Stereo-Audio (rare, and usually used only for specific devices).
Meanwhile, let us go through the classifications of the jacks, and their significance of the same, starting with the single ringed.striped earphone jack,
One ringed Jack Earphones:
A single ring indicates that there are two sections so the plug is mono and plays the same sound in headphones.
Two ringed Jack Earphones:
The two stripes are bit advanced and called as regular stereo headphones, they tend to have two rings creating three sections with two of them providing the connection to the left and right speakers.
Three ringed Jack Earphones:
This is the most advanced and currently trending kind, the third ring indicates the presence of ‘microphone’.