Re: How about...
Hopefully, in this day and age, USB sound devices use USB 2.0? (While many devices still use PCIe v1 or v2, when newer specs exist: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" ? - My answer: USB 1.0 was born "broke".)
I've got a very long blog post(/rant) on this topic that I'm still trying to reduce to something actually readable by the sort of half-tech-literate audience that might benefit from it. Some of the takeaways:
1. Many USB audio devices are UAC class 1, which dates to roughly the original USB (or USB 1.1, I forget right now) spec.
2. USB 1,2,3... are not speeds. USB LS, FS, HS, SS (low, full, high, super) are. USB number is not actually that useful in knowing the capabilities, leading to:
3. If a device is USB-C it is by definition USB 2 or higher, USB 2 was revised to include the USB-C connector. A USB-C device can never be USB 1 even if...
4. ... 2+3= a USB-C device may still only be capable of USB FS communication. UAC-1 uses FS.
5. USB FS is plenty of bandwidth for reasonable audio, particularly uni-directional, as in the comment above.
6. But USB FS communications when on a controller managing high speed devices result in scheduling that drops the available bandwidth for isochronous streams quite a bit below even the FS bandwidth.
7. Pretty much every USB-C headphone or headphone adapter is: a. USB-UAC1, and b. Pushing ridiculous sample rates and depths for playback, I've met some that are also trying to do 24bit 48kHz stereo input on a lapel mic. Put this all together and, if it doesn't fall over by itself, it quickly does if it has to share with, for example, a webcam or a GSM modem even when the nominal available bandwidth at even USB HS should easily be enough.
The model in USB-1 era for this kind of thing was multiple ports with their own controllers if you wanted to run the high bandwidth profiles in UAC1, but since USB2 the tendency is lots of ports on a single controller. At the same time cute little dongles for USB-C now support the kind of profiles only pro hardware used to, plug it into a phone and there's no way to choose (in linux you can if you're willing to dig about in pipewire configs, but audio menus wont let you, maybe windows can do similar). USB3 and newer USB2 devices at least have xHCI controllers, which can schedule a bit more robustly, worst of all worlds is if you happen to have USB 2 era EHCI but without a dedicated OHCI/UCHI controller for the USB-1 mode.
Okay, you can now see why that blog post is unmanageable.