One of the particularities of the Amazon Alexa devices is that they are more or less designed to play music using any kind of speakers. In fact, Amazon frequently uses the Amazon Alexa as an interchangeable term with "speakers". Starting from the design of the Amazon Alexa and downright to the capabilities of the Alexa devices, the idea is that Amazon mainly intends the Amazon Alexa to be used to play audio out loud with very little capabilities left over for headsets, streaming or line-out and mixing.

The following tutorial demonstrates how to add a 3.5mm stereo socket to the Amazon Echo Show 5 in order to be able to feed the Alexa output sound to a mixer or right back into the PC. It is possible that in doing so, the Alexa is made much more useful since it would help with the immersion: a PC user would be able to use Alexa at the same time as listening to other stuff in the same headphones.

• a 3.5mm stereo socket,
• an Amazon Alexa Echo Show 5 (other version might just work if they are missing the socket),
• strong double-sided sticky tape or glue gun,
• thin wires (ribbon cable wires are pretty good),
• soldering equipment and Dremel.

As it so happens, a broken Beats headphone has been scuttled and the stereo socket salvaged.

The stereo socket seems to be good quality and is sturdy enough. The socket is soldered to a small detachable PCB.

Using a Dremel, the small PCB is sanded down to the bare minimum and then connected to the main board of the Amazon Echo Show 5 for testing.

One of the problems is that the Amazon Echo Show 5 is a mono device with one single speaker whereas the salvaged 3.5mm socket is a stereo socket. A sketch of the stereo socket is roughly the following:

   +-----+
   |     |- R
L -|     |
   |     |
   +-+ +-+- G

where:

• L represents the left channel,
• R represents the right channel,
• G is the common ground.

Theoretically, only one single channel should be connected and then, perhaps, a mixer-level solution (or software in case the socket is to be connected to the PC) should be used to balance one of the channels across both left and right channels. Nevertheless, it was just so decided that the left L and right R channels should be soldered together with a wire in order to output the audio to both left and right channels without having to balance.

After some rigorous testing, it turned out that the Alexa worked perfectly and would output audio both through the added 3.5mm stereo socket and out of the built-in speakers. The PCB was then glued onto the Amazon Echo Show 5 PCB at the back.

With the PCB in place, a hole was drilled at the back of the device in order to allow the 3.5mm jack to be plugged into the back of the Alexa Echo Show 5 along with the rest of the ports (power and USB). Assembling the Alexa was also a piece of cake and the very thin ribbon wires were left dangling given that there is ample space inside the device (perhaps for other mods in the future).

Putting the device back together, the power jack and the audio jack are both connected.

• Technically speaking, the audio socket that has been added represents a headphone port and not a line-out port since the points to which the leads were connected are most likely to be found after the Amazon Alexa Echo Show 5 amplifier. Were a line-out port desired, then the leads should have been connected somewhere on the PCB before the amplifier of the Echo Show. Nevertheless, it was considered too much of a bother to do so and the internal Amazon Echo Show 5 speaker is connected to two very conveniently exposed traces.
• It is interesting that the Amazon Echo Show 5 PCB at the back of the device already has space for a 3.5mm audio socket so it might be the case that the circuit is functional but lacks just the socket. Even the plastic shell at the back has a spot that would make one think that the device just had the line-out capabilities ripped out before being released.

• It would be nicer to be able to split input sound as spoken by the user from output sound as delivered by Alexa. At the very least, a switch could be added in order to disable the Alexa speakers completely and only allow sound output through the 3.5mm socket.
• Obviously the sound is a little annoying given that it is played through a single channel (mono). It is perhaps possible to add a mono-to-stereo converter based on two LM1458 amplifiers to make the sound more pleasant.