Unfortunately, it's a cheap DAC/amp dongle as, unlike some other phones, the Pixel 2 doesn't output analog audio via USB-C using the phone's built-in DAC/amp. And the Pixel 2 XL has its gain set really low for said dongle, meaning you're going to have difficulty driving lots of headphones.

That's really unfortunate. Do any phones do it right?

iPhone 7 dongle audio quality is apparently fantastic, no reason to think iPhone 8 isn't the same.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qua...

> This tiny adapter houses a microscopic stereo digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a stereo headphone amplifier, a microphone preamplifier and monophonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and power converters to run this all.

OK what the hell, I thought they were just outputting analog through Lightning from the internal DAC but instead they put a second conversion chain in the adapter? Damn.

> You need iOS 10 for the adapter to work on older devices. iOS 9 and before predate the headphone-jack-less iPhones, but if you have iOS 10 it works great on my old iPhone 5S — not that you'd need it to.

And it works just fine on older lightning devices too, that's really impressive.

Oh wow thats a pretty awesome read

Worth noting that the Pixel 2 regular size isn't affected by the low gain setting the XL is. It's still using a cheap DAC/amp dongle, though.