The Apple dongle is just an external DAC(someone put the circuit in a phone) and costs $10US.
You're needlessly converting to 'lightning protocol' and back. DAC will be lower quality than an internal one (because of size and power constraints and the fact that you need one internal and one external)
Here's an idea: Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter and which one isn't. I bet you won't hear the difference.
Headphones -> headphone jack in device is sensible. A dongle isn't.
I would really like to know how many people who find issue with the dongle have day-to-day experience with a headphone jack-less device. My bigger concern is that headphone jacks will vanish from headphones.
Yes it does, unless the port has an analog audio channel
It's extra hardware that has to be on the dongle (at the expense of everything else) - for Audio I'm gessing it's USB https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/syst...
> Try blind testing 10 songs or so and see if you can figure out which one is played from the adapter
Would be an interesting test, I would begin by checking the max volume allowed
Then you'd have an internal DAC. Apple is extremely greedy with space, but a DAC/amp isn't large. The dongle has more available space. The sound is digital before being converted either way, the "lighting protocol" won't hurt the quality unless they lossily compress, which I doubt.
According to this site, http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qua..., Apple's dongle is roughly the same as the internal DACs on iPads and iPhones.
Generic dongles purchased from Amazon can be expected to have lower quality DAC's, but most people that want to cheap out on something that only costs 9 dollars probably aren't using good enough headphones or speakers to care.
People that really care about audio quality can purchase something like this, https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-DragonFly-Red-Headphone-Am..., which is higher quality than what you will find in any smartphone.