GTrusted

USB Type-C Headphones is a relatively new concept, promising to get rid of the 3.5mm audio jack that is now standard on most phones.  LeEco was the first to remove the 3.5mm audio jack altogether on phones like the LeEco Le Max 2 and offer the CDLA Digital Earphones as the main  headphones that can be connected to the phone's USB Type-C port.  

The CDLA Digital Earphones is simply a USB audio device not unlike USB speakers or headsets that you connect to your PC.

Like a Windows PC, Android phones now support USB audio natively starting with Lollipop.  This means that the CDLA Digital Earphones not only works with the LeEco Le Max 2, if you can it for a lot of the other USB Type-C phones out there.

We tested the CDLA Digital Earphones with the LG G5, Huawei P9, HTC 10, Xiaomi Mi 5, OnePlus 3, Huawei Google Nexus 6P, and the LG Google Nexus 5X.  The good news is that audio works fine with all these USB Type-C based Android smartphones. 

Note the CDLA Digital Earphones does not work with the Windows based Microsoft Lumia 950 (click here for more info).

We can see from this USB Device Info screenshot that the CDLA Digital Earphones enumerate as a USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s) peripheral and declares that it consumes a maximum power of 100 mA.  This means that these headphones will pull a max of .5 watts (5 volts @ .1 amps) from your smartphone while pumping music and should pull under .0125 watts (5 volts @ 2.5 mA) of suspend current when not in use and the headphones are in a sleep state.

Given more active chips involved, using USB Type-C for headphones will always take more power than using traditional 3.5 mm headphones (generally in the milliwatt range) but the question is how much.  

We then took a closer look at how much current the CDLA Digital Earphones actually draws and found that at most it draws about 25 mA at maximum volume down to about 11 mA at the lowest volume level.