From an EE perspective headphone elements are merely small very low performance speakers. The only "DRM" I can think of with USB-C is playing impedance games.

From an EE perspective headphone elements are merely small very low performance speakers. The only "DRM" I can think of with USB-C is playing impedance games. So right now you could probably get away with soldering a 1K resistor and a RCA plug in place of the headphone element and you'll have a usable signal, but if they played weird impedance games you might need a simple opamp in there to adjust the levels to normal. Something that's annoying today is to get line level audio out of the bluetooth connection to my car stereo I need to bypass a nanny warning about blowing my ears out, but only on my phone. Apparently "line level" on my BT adapter that makes my BT volume about the same as, say, the radio or CD, would, if connected to a BT earpiece or headphones, blow someones ears out. You can safely assume the people who screwed up something so incredibly simple as setting levels, will successfully find a way to screw up usb-C headphone levels. So one brand will nanny-state and prevent anything louder than a church whisper, others will sound different levels based on what device they connect to, it'll be the predictable epic fail. Speaking of my nice bluetooth headphones with their couple hours of battery life, since buying them many years ago I haven't plugged headphones into my phone or tablet. They're nice enough headphones. I'm just surprised the marketing push is to keep shoving audio thru legacy wired cables instead of going full on bluetooth. I suppose there's a lot of money to be made in worn out headphone cables. When I'm not listening to music, but speech instead (audio books, podcasts, etc) I'll swap my bluetooth headphones for my bluetooth earpiece thingy.