I will be auditioning some speakers at a dealer with a good DAC but no streamer. I was thinking I could use ARC with my iPhone, but would then need a digital signal out of my iPhone to the DAC. I don’t expect it to be an airplay enabled DAC. Any suggestions? Thanks.
USB connection should work (assuming the DAC supports it - which most do).
It’s been a long time since I tried to connect my iPhone directly to a DAC, but years ago that was not an easy thing to do. Are you saying that nowadays all you have to do is use a standard lightning to USB cable and it will feed music to a DAC?
Yep, that easy on modern dacs.
It’s especially easy if your phone has usb-c like an iPhone 15 (I know nothing about android phones), get a usb-c to usb-b cable to take with you. Eg:
On android phones, by default, USB DACs are still limited, by the phone OS, to 48kHz. Roon include an optional USB driver Beta implemenation which will go to hi-res when turned on. This works for some (including me - Pixel 6 and FIIO BTR7 or FIIO K9 Pro ESS) but some still appear to be having issues with application crashes when the USB driver is enabled.