How toes the Lighting to Aux adapter work

[Jmausmuc]

Does anyone know how this works?
IS the audio signal converted from digital to analogue before it "leaves" the phone though the lightning port is or it converted inside the adapter (through a chip).

Reason for asking: I one had a BMW y-cable which splitted the lightning output into an aux output for audio and a usb input for power. This cable happened to make the music sound very very bad because as far as I know the cable had a chip in it that did the digital to analogue conversion.

 

[Phil A.]

There's no analog out on the lightning port so I guess there must be a DAC in the adapter and the quality of the audio coming out will be dependent on the quality of the chip in the adapter. I'd guess that it would be equal to the quality of the in-built DAC in the phone though

 

[Bacillus]

I wouldn't know (as for Apple's legendary documentation...) and wouldn't approximate on the quality of a $9 stub.
Aren't we all waiting for an Y-adapter ?