I want to be able to plug my phone into existing, standard speaker systems. The simplest way to do that is to get a usb c to headphone cable. Or just an adapter, as i have a number of headphones to headphone cables.
Adapters come with and without a splitter so you can simultaneously charge. That sounds potentially useful, but it means the adapter is larger and more complicated and maybe more likely to break in my bag.
And advice? And considerations I’ve overlooked?
Consider using a bluetooth dongle on the speaker system and go wireless.
The speaker systems i want to talk to predate Bluetooth, and i doubt that’s the best bet. Wouldn’t i need to power the Bluetooth dongle in some way? Also, pairing Bluetooth can be flaky. I want a solution that just works, quickly and without fuss.
When i want to do this, there’s no problem with leaving my phone on the table next to the speaker or amplifier.
Ah, it’s worth mentioning that most of the systems I’d want to connect to include an amplifier somewhere in the chain.
You’d need to power the bluetooth adapter somehow, yes. Any USB charger will do it.
I don’t have any experience with USB to audio dongles other than the one Apple sells, just keep in mind that it’s not just a form factor conversion. When phones ditched the audio jack they also ditched the hardware DAC, the digital audio converter. Bluetooth adapters will have one, as will the physical dongles (it’s embedded in one of the ends). All that to say, quality/brand matter here more than with most cables.
The use case here is square dancing. I do challenge square dancing. (It’s not competitive. It’s called challenge because it’s hard, though.) And callers sell “tapes” (actually mp3s, these days) that a “tape group” will dance to. That’s a group of 8+ people in a basement or back yard with a speaker system of some sort, usually. I have tapes on my phone, and want to be able to plug into the sound system when we dance. As i do this in multiple places, there are several different sounds systems I’d want to quickly plug into. Most (all?) of them accept a headphone jack as input.
Since I’d want to leave the phone sitting in a table so any dancer could pause the music, there’s really no benefit to wireless, and Bluetooth is often a hassle.
I have a Bluetooth dongle with RCA outputs hooked up to my stereo. It does need power and I have that connected to the switched port of the stereo. This way I can connect and disconnect based on the stereo power.
I generally find Bluetooth to be annoying, but this dongle works well.
I like the Bluetooth solution because (a) I can charge at the same time and, more importantly, I can have my phone with me instead of by the stereo.
Edit: just saw your last post and wired sounds better for that use case
I just finished doing something similar in the new shop I’m setting up under my house. I wanted to be able to play sound from both my laptop and my phone through an old 5.1 home theater system that doesn’t have an HDMI in port, only a 3.5mm aux input.
There are many ways to do this and the approach you described (USB C to (presumably) 3.5mm stereo) sounds like it would be perfectly appropriate for you. I’m using a 3.5mm splitter on the aux input port and it works just fine to go back and forth between the two sources.
My phone is a Pixel, if that matters.
What hardware are you using for the connection?
And yes, technically I’m taking about a 3.5mm aux input to an amp, not a “headphone jack”.
If I were you I’d get both a powered one for regular use AND a simpler unpowered one for backup and bring both to the dances. They’re cheap and small enough, and plus you don’t want a broken or frayed dongle to ruin a night of dancing!
You might also consider a simple MP3 player or laptop for this, with a built in headphone jack, especially if anyone else is going to be operating the playback. That way they don’t have to keep unlocking your phone, dealing with notifications, finding the right app, etc. If they’re Apple users they might not even know how to use an Android very well. And if you forget to set do not disturb you risk errant texts or phone calls interrupting the music.
The more foolproof you can make it, the better (and there the laptop wins out, if you keep the screen on and the app maximized, with clear and big play/pause buttons).
We usually use a laptop. We usually use a laptop with special “tape-like” controls to make the whole process easier. Honestly, i want this as a backup solution when other things go wrong, or for pop-up opportunities.
(Old tape players had options like “return to a set point” that are super useful, and no longer standard. So that’s been coded, of course.)
The dongles make sense then. Just get one of each or a couple of one kind in case one of the dongles flake. They’re not always super reliable in my limited experience, especially if you keep them in a bag with other stuff.
Interesting, I have a Pixel as well (8a) and it has a quirk associated with the USB C output. When I use wired (as opposed to bluetooth) headphones to listen to my Audible app, the first second or so of each paragraph of narration drops out. After hours combing Reddit I found someone who had the same problem and they kludged it by playing a whitenoise app in the background. I did the same and it works most of the time, but there’s no problem at all when I use bluetooth (quite the reverse of the usual situation, I know).
Anyway, to go from my phone to my 5.1 home theater system I use a bluetooth dongle on one of the 3.5 splitter ports. On the laptop side I bought a special little box that extracts the audio from the HDMI out signal of the laptop and sends it as stereo via 3.5mm to the other splitter port. My 5.1 home theater system doesn’t have any way to input a 5.1 signal other than from DVDs but the special little box can extract 5.1 and output it via an optical cable as an option.
5.1 from your phone? Is this for movies or music with spatial audio? Or is it just copying the stereo signal to the other channels?
I have a USB-C → female aux input dongle (3.5mm stereo jack) that works just fine all the time. I’ve used it with multiple Samsung phones, so at least it works with that flavor of Android.
If you want charging too, any one of these should work fine:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+c+splitter+charging+and+audio
No, sorry my post was confusing, 5.1 from my laptop, stereo from my phone.
How about wireless charging while you’re hooked up to the headphone jack?
I don’t carry a wireless charger around with me to dance events or similar. I usually have a wired charger and/or a battery with me.
A wireless charger can be pretty compact.
Hmm, I’ve never seen one nearly as compact as a small wired one. And i already carry a lot of junk around. I’m debating whether it’s worth adding a dongle or two to the “stuff i haul all over the place”.
Add one of those aux/USB-C dongles (very small, just two short wires) and get something like this:
Small, would plug directly into the dongle to charge your phone if you need it. I have a similar one and it’s really handy. It can actually charge three devices at the same time, but having that built-in USB-C cable is very nice (you can use it to charge your phone, or plug it into a charger to charge the battery). It would probably charge your phone completely twice before needing to be charged itself.