This is a review and detailed measurements of the USB-C Headphone Jack Adapter DAC and Headphone amplifier for phones and tablets. It was kindly purchased and drop shipped to me for testing. It costs US $14.99 from Samsung website and Amazon with free shipping.
The dongle is a bit more streamlined than its competitor:
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The Samsung dongle was nicely recognized on my Windows 10 PC allowing me to test it there with full functionality of my Audio Precision analyzer.
I was shocked at the end of the review when I hooked it up to my Samsung S8+ and have it act like Apple USB-C dongle. That is, with Neutron Pro player it had low volume and garbled/staticy sound. With Google Play as with Apple Dongle, it had much reduced level. So much that the native headphone output from my Samsung S8+ blew it away. I looked at the list of compatible devices on Samsung website and was shocked that it is only compatible with their latest generation of portable devices and not the S8 series!
Really Samsung? You couldn't add a driver for S8 series and we are yesterday's girlfriend already? Shame on you. I almost gave you the beheaded pink panther for the first time due to functionality of the device, than its performance.
The similarity to Apple continues in some of the measurements as well and there, it is a good thing. Let's get into that.
Audio Measurements
As is typical of these dongles, maximum output was limited to 1 volt:
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Distortion performance is quite good though with the highest peak being second harmonic and below -100 dB. The spray of spikes starting at 100 Hz and going through is because the Samsung dongle truncates samples to 16 bits using my ASIO setup. So ignore that. SINAD which is combined measure of noise and distortion is quite respectable, second to only Apple in these small dongles:
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Frequency response was essentially dead flat:
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Filter response was a bit choppy but good nevertheless:
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Intermodulation distortion and noise is not desktop class but is not screwy either:
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Jitter response shows a spray of spikes which I think are due to data dependency (i.e. lack of isolation between digital and analog stages):
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Linearity shows what is to be expected when 24 bit source samples are truncated to 16 bits (which again, could be a driver issue in Windows):
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Most important test is power versus distortion and noise. So let's measure that using a 300 ohm load:
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We see that the Samsung dongle is neck and neck with Apple dongle. Its noise level is higher but this is a new PC I am using. It is possible that all of these dongles are sensitive to noise from USB bus and my new PC is worse. Or that the dongle is noisier.
Similar story exists for 33 ohm load:
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This is the stacking order then:
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The Samsung is clearly ahead of its Android competitors such as Google Pixel V2 and HTC.
With respect to noise, here is our dynamic range at full output and with just 50 millivolts simulating driving a sensitive IEM:
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Full range is certainly good enough. 50 millivolts though, puts it in the potentially noisy department:
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Output impedance is comfortably low and hence, not a concern:
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Listening Tests
As I noted in the review, trying to use the dongle on my Samsung S8+ was a complete bust. It was too faint to be usable.
With my desktop PC, the Sennheiser HD-650 had good enough volume to be usable and enjoyable to some extent. With Drop Ether CX headphones which are low impedance (25 ohm) and inefficient, the Samsung dongle was usable but nothing to write home about.
Conclusions
As far as I am personally concerned, lack of support for Samsung S8 phone is a total failure. Fortunately that phone has its own headphone output so we don't need the stupid dongle for it.
Measured performance seems to be only second to Apple which is quite good given how bad the current Android dongles have been doing. And the fact that you can't use the Apple dongle on Android devices (but maybe you can now with series 10 Samsung devices?), means there is a real alternative on Android now.
So as long as you have a Samsung compatible device, I can recommend the Samsung USB-C headphone dongle.
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As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.
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