Smartphone without a 3.5mm out? Use a MHL HDMI cable!

Equipment / Electronics / Gear / Accessories DAPs
1

It’s something I completely forgot, but need to mention here.

MHL are basically “USB to HDMI cables”, working with a lot of smartphones, even my old Samsung Note 3. But… HDMI outputs audio, too!

So if you want to bypass your phone’s DAC (and amp, if you have a 3.5mm out), you plug a MHL cable to your AVR, and voilà, you got yourself a new DAP for your living room. AFAIK it’s lossless, and might even be better than USB: USB audio has no error correction. HDMI has ECC:

(Wikipedia)

HDMI adds the ability to send audio and auxiliary data using 4b/10b encoding for the Data Island Period. Each Data Island Period is 32 pixels in size and contains a 32-bit Packet Header, which includes 8 bits of BCH ECC parity data for error correction and describes the contents of the packet.

And as a bonus, it charges your phone at the same time, too!

Enjoy! :headphones: :smile:

1 Like
2

There are also HDMI to optical (or coaxial)… thingies, even old Monoprice HDMI splitters could output 5.1 (or 24bit/192khz audio!) through optical or coax.

1 Like
3

any particular model you recommend?

4

For once, because of the built-in HDMI error correction, I think it’s fair to say “cables are cables”. I’m using a 10$CAD red mhl cable right now.

Still, for older ones, you might need a usb-to-(hdmi-and-usb-power) Y-cable (smartphone batteries don’t have enough juice to send hdmi audio + video?). But for recent ones I’m not sure.

1 Like