I know that Amir ran a review of a companion product, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. I was doing measurements on two interfaces meant to allow musicians to use the iPhone as a recording setup but with high quality external mics. While I was doing this, I thought it would be worth seeing what the baseline is. So I played a couple of .wav files through the iPhone and adapter and measured the results. Just a couple measurements, but enough to convince me that you don't lose much going to a bare-bones cheapie DAC and headphone amp. I still despise the Apple ecosystem (the machinations I had to do for simple file transfer tasks were infuriating compared to the ease of Windows) but I can't complain about this performance.