One of the advantages of USB Type-C is that it’s about a connector that is suitable for many “needs”: actually, it’s able to manage audio and video signals, and transfer energy. To avoid the necessity to use intermediate adapters and connectors, anyway, it’s required that the specs permit the several streams.
In the case of audio support by USB Type-C, the USB Implementers Forum has just defined the final specs, called USB Audio Device Class 3.0.
Despite Lenovo and Apple have already acted as pioneers (just think about the Apple’s decision to remove the 3,5mm headphones jack from their iPhone 7), from now on, all the interested producers might officially use USB Type-C to transfer the audio stream too, without any intermediate hardware components.
The USB Type-C connector supports both analogic and digital signals (the old jack connector, instead, uses analogic signals only). The freshly released specs, moreover, define the circuitry that will have to be used for the jack of player USB Type-C devices.
They mentioned the use of an MPU (multi-processing unit) processor and the modes for the management of the several signals, the sync between the devices, the audio conversion, the noise removal, the equalization, volume controls and so on.