Technology

All phones with a 3.5mm audio jack have a DAC. You can't play digital audio without one somewhere along the chain and all audio going through a phone or PC is digital unless you're picking up a radio signal or some other analog signal that's being fed directly to the audio jack.

You probably mean it comes with a good DAC, since they aren't all created equal.

A bit of a tangent, but I believe that's why people considered Macs better for audio stuff, they probably used a better DAC than most motherboards come with or might have just added that pathway in general back when it wasn't standard on most PC motherboards and your had to use a sound card if you wanted better audio than the PC speaker which was more of a synthesizer. They'd take a pitch and generate an analog wave at that frequency while a DAC uses a sample rate and series of amplitudes at that frequency to generate rich sound.

My current phone is an LG G8 and I have no idea what I'm going to replace it with when it finally dies. I'm half considering seeing if one of the local repair shops can replace the battery on it because that's what's starting to go.

Honestly, I blame LG's marketing team on the failure of their phone department. Hardly anyone knew about the built in DAC, and they should have been pushing that hard to the audiophiles.