I admit to mystification myself at the work out in here for what feels like a pretty rare use case!
With 3.5mm stereo jacks gone, I do think there are some folks who use USB audio a lot now! But it also feels like it's gotta be a pretty small crowd! This sure feels like a long long way to go to give these select few a battery life boost! It'd be interesting to know how big the impact is, to at least weigh this long effort.
Like you, would love to know if there's anything cute folks have done for offloading Bluetooth! my gut says there are vastly vastly vastly more Bluetooth users.
USB-C headphones for phones have their own audio interfaces, yep. Headsets and webcams have usb audio interfaces too.
Also, I guess there are a good bunch of devices that have audio interfaces that, internally, might be connected to the USB bus.
But I'm also thinking about sound "processing" oriented hardware that could run Linux. Sound recorders, mixers, synths, smart speakers... that could be based on an SBC or an ARM or similar processor.
With 3.5mm stereo jacks gone, I do think there are some folks who use USB audio a lot now! But it also feels like it's gotta be a pretty small crowd! This sure feels like a long long way to go to give these select few a battery life boost! It'd be interesting to know how big the impact is, to at least weigh this long effort.
Like you, would love to know if there's anything cute folks have done for offloading Bluetooth! my gut says there are vastly vastly vastly more Bluetooth users.