

AFAIK it depends on the adapter, some phones have an inbuilt DAC and literally just use pins in the USB-C port for headphones, which means the dongle is literally just wires.
Other phones don’t have that and require the dongle to have its own DAC.
You probably used a simple adapter on a phone which didn’t have those headphone lines in the USB-C port.



















As someone who loved the Samsung Galaxy S series up until the S10, that’s not quite true. Samsung actually built decent DACs into their phones, with the S10 having that 32 bit 192 kHz.