You can't hear AAC compression artifacts. Or do you have an ABX test?
And if you could, it'd be balanced out in outdoors use cases by the lack of wired audio artifacts, namely cable telephonics sending walking impacts into your ears.
Anyway, AirPods do support lossless audio now. (Well, next year.)
They have a dongle that is pretty nice. But why would I want to run my really nice headphones with iPhone as the source?
Not all "really nice" headphones are high-impedance, and if they were a headphone amp isn't a source, it's an amp.
The source is the DAC and the DAC in that dongle is better than most audiophile DACs are. Remember, audiophile equipment is scams made by small companies and iPhone dongles have bigger R&D budgets than their entire industry.
Re:iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus
by robotresearcher on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @03:46PM
(#37486943)
Is the DAC in the cheap dongle worse than the old built in DAC?
Of course marketing sold it as benefit, which for some it was since they are ok with average quality. Considering thick brick that current iphones are for quite some time, space taken by port was never the issue, unlike stated originally as reason for removal.