I want to share my experience with Creative tech support and Android USB host mode.
When I connect my E5 to my Oneplus One, two things happen:
- The battery in the E5 is charging my Oneplus One. This makes the E5 battery drain very rapidly.
- When connecting the Sound Blaster E5 USB DAC to my phone I am hearing lots of crackling noise in the right channel. It is only audible when sound is playing, there is no crackling noise when there is no audio playing. It is also only happening with Google Music player, not Poweramp, which leads me to believe it's related to the way it's playing the audio, which is potentially the offload or low latency path when using Google Music player
The second issue is perhaps specific to my phone - though it does not happen with my iBasso D10 Cobra.
The first issue however, charging the host in USB host mode, is happening on every device I connect it to. This basically kills that use case for me entirely because it depletes way too fast.
Creative tech support says that:
Code:
When USB Host is used as point of connection on the Sound Blaster E5, the unit's normal behavior is to charge smartphone device eventually. This is part of the hardware design which cannot be prevented and there is no alternative option to disable it through the hardware.
So that's that. A bit disappointing.
Other than that, the apt-x low latency is working very well with my Avantree Priva aptx-ll transmitter, which is nice.
Last but not least, I too notice the noise floor. When connected to phone in host mode I notice a high frequency pitch, regardless of volume level. I blame the battery charging problem. And it probably can't be fixed.
Connected to my PC something caught me off guard - when the E5 is connected to my linux box, it turns on the MIC and the MIC seems to loop back to the headphones on the device itself - no amount of muting or volume settings on my linux box will turn the mic off, so I can't test noise floor as USB DAC currently.