ARC bit-perfect in Android phone! [To External USB-DAC]

We are still planning to address this. We released the USB driver last year, which was the first step. The ARC team is currently hard at work bringing DSP to ARC, which as you can imagine is a fairly long project. It’s coming out really nice, though :slight_smile:

As for bit-perfect support on Android, there are really three use cases:

  • USB output (released in November)
  • Headphone output on phones
  • Headphone outputs on DAPs

Additionally, we have DSP coming as an audio-oriented feature for ARC.

Our team’s size doesn’t allow us to do all of these at once, so we have to put them in order. USB driver came first, then DSP, then the others. And of course, these compete for resources with other projects like CarPlay, Android Auto, general performance/stability work, and so on.

Headphone jacks on phones are available on <10% of our users’ devices now. If they were on 100% like 7-10 years ago, we would have put this part of the work in front of the USB driver and DSP, but this is a niche use case at this point.

So, DAPs are going to be the reason why we put energy into bit-perfect support for built-in outputs on Android. The same work will likely light up a lot of phones, but seeing as headphone jacks on phones are looking pretty much nonexistant going forward, this can’t be our main motivator.

There’s a few things to do to make DAPs work well. Some related to audio, some related to performance or UI, some related to media storage, and some that involve collaboration/partnership with the DAP manufacturers. It is all in the pipeline.

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