Question about Lightning to 3.5mm adapters

[imrazor]

Since Lightning is a digital out, it stands to reason that the little dongle Apple sells contains some kind of DAC. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) And from my casual listening it's pretty mediocre, at least when you compare new Apple Lightning buds vs old buds with the Apple dongle. At least it's cheap.

So what are other options? Has anyone found a small(ish) Lightning to 3.5mm adapter that provides decent audio quality. I know something that small having an amp is probably not going to happen, but I'd like to get better sound quality out of this expensive iPhone.

 

[tmb821]

I went down this rabbit hole. The best quality I found was to pair a es100, or btr3/5, or any of the other Bluetooth dongles to the iPhone. The lightning to 3.5 just always seemed too big, stuck out oddly, and didn’t have the same sq. And I felt that the dongles had much better volume control than the iPhone itself.