Right now if you want to upgrade the audio of your iPhone you can go with something like the Oppo HA-2 which you need to strap to your phone using elastic bands. That’s all about to change thanks to Arcam’s MusicBoost which is a battery pack, digital to analogue converter ( DAC ) and headphone amplifier.
MusicBoost offers 120% more battery to the iPhone which also goes to powering the high-precision DAC and headphone amp so they don’t suck any juice from the iPhone. The combo case takes the digital audio stream directly from the iPhone’s Lightning connector thru its Lightning Audio Module to bypass the iPhone’s own audio hardware.
The company says that it will upgrade all iPhone audio from iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify, Tiday, Qobuz etc and will also play nice with FLAC, WAV etc when using 3rd party apps such as VOX, Flac Player+ etc. MusicBOOST has enough oomph to drive sensitive IEMs right through to power-hungry cans.
MusicBosst can be recharged via a bundled microUSB cable which will pass the power to the phone too.
The MusicBOOST is currently in pre-production and will go on sale early December for around £120 or ~$180 (this is still subject to change).