In my case, I also needed +5V, which was taken from a random empty pad on the board:Īfter soldering the DAC board and a peace of wire together, the view was as follow:Īs you can see in the photo above, the red wire was used for +5V, black – GND, white – Left channel, Green – Right channel. Usually, they have GND, L, R and MIC pads on the board. There is only one tiny problem with USB-C DAC boards.

I have chosen to use USB connection instead of standard 3.5 mm jack just because USB can deliver power to the connected device, which is needed for the amplifier. Although ALC5686 noise goes away when you play music (so it is not such a big deal), I eventually decided to stick with the older ALC4042 IC. I have also tried a newer version ALC5686 DAC, but it had a bit of noise at output when idle (no music is playing) while ALC4042 was totally quiet. Either way, it would be a bit naïve to expect extraordinary quality of such tiny, mobile oriented, device. are not known to me as I haven’t searched enough or did not take the measurements. Other parameters such as signal to noise ratio, THD, etc. Its main parameters are 384 kHz sampling rate and 32 bit word length. The USB-C DAC (Links in the end of this post) uses ALC4042 IC to convert digital to analog audio. On the other end there is the amplifier PCB which contains two main circuits: power delivery and amplification.įor the DAC to Amplifier interconnection, a simple 4 wire USB cable was used: The ALC4042 USB-C DAC On the first cable end it has an USB-C DAC which takes digital audio signal and converts it into analog signal.

DIY Micro USB-C to 3.5mm Adapter and Headphone Amplifier (Part 4) (This page).Micro USB-C to 3.5mm Adapter and Headphone Amplifier (Part 3).DIY Micro PCB Headphone Amplifier (Part 2).DIY portable headphone amplifier based on an INA1620 chip and TPS65135 (Part 1).Today, I will show, how the amplifier was fully assembled to a fully finished device. This is going to be the last part of DIY USB-C adapter and micro amplifier post series.

Power amplifier diy