AudioQuest DragonFly DAC USB Digital Audio Converter - Cobalt

Product Information

ps. this thing has to be a respectable Audiophile device if the Editor of the World's most Authoritative Audiophile Journal owns one. Isn't JA1 the highest Authority that we Audiophiles had ? ( jus say'n ) Of course JA2 is equally brilliant and is also brave enough to take sides with MQA and the lovely Devialet stuff. DragonFly Cobalt, the new flagship DAC, takes what music lovers around the world have come to expect from the multi-award-winning DragonFly family—naturally beautiful, seductive sound—and strips away fuzz and fog that weren't even noticeable until Cobalt removed them. Bass doesn’t extend that much lower through the Cobalt, but there is a definite improvement in the resolution and overall tone. Documentation” means install scripts and online or electronic documentation associated, included, or provided in connection with the Software, or any portion thereof.

Superb Hifi sound out of a mobile phone! I bought a Dragonfly Cobalt just a few days ago on recomendation from a friend, who just bought one for himself a short while ago. Part of this precision is due to noise reduction. AudioQuest claim they’ve tweaked the internal circuitry to reduce interference from things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as electrical noise. You’d have to perform specific tests to measure the noise levels - not something we have the budget or expertise for - but we believe we could hear the difference. We tested the DragonFly Cobalt both against our laptop’s headphone output and a Bluetooth-based DAC, the Bluewave GET ( full review here). The Cobalt’s sound felt significantly cleaner and more realistic than both, and in the case of the headphone output, that goes double.You also get a manual - excuse us, Flight Manual. You probably won’t need it, given how simple the Cobalt is, but it’s well laid-out for when you do need to reference something. We’d strongly suggest keeping it around, although there is a digital version available. AudioQuest likes MQA and they were fast to jump on the MQA wagon and make the DragonFly an MQA renderer. In this article and video we explain and show how to set up your DragonFly for MQA streaming in Tidal. A dongle dac-amp is exposed to all these noises whereas most designated dacs have the option of a separate power supply. Separating power and data lines improve dac behaviour and there is no need to clean the computer’s VBUS noise. To help AQ improve Your graphics experience, AQ may collect non-personal information, including the model of AQ graphics product, its device id, and other system information. While with high impedance headphones, the AudioQuest Dragonfly Cobalt has acceptable subjective performance, it fails in so many other ways that I cannot recommend it.

The Cobalt's output amplifier is the same as that used in the Red, an ESS Sabre9601. This is a DC-coupled, unity-gain device and runs off a single positive voltage rail. (An integral charge pump provides the necessary negative voltage.) The Cobalt is also said to feature improved power-supply filtering, increasing the audio circuitry's immunity to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular noise. AudioQuest is a US based company and the EU headquarters is located in the Netherlands. AudioQuest since the 1980’s is mostly known for their cables but they became even more popular among “head-fiers” when they released a very popular mini USB DAC/AMP called the DragonFly. One word of caution: AudioQuest make a USB filter called the Jitterbug, which is designed to remove a type of digital noise known as jitter (and as a result, has quite a cool name). The Cobalt actually uses a lot of the circuitry found in the Jitterbug, and as a result, it’s not recommended to use the two in sequence. You can use them plugged into two separate USB ports, but we didn’t notice a major difference in the sound when we did. If you have the Cobalt, you can forget about the Jitterbug.The sonic image was like an analog photo: atmospheric, with a good depth of field, never overpixelated or oversharpened. But it takes more than that to produce good sound and therefore to define value: it is the dac chip + dac implementation (including filtering) + analogue output stage of the dac + the amp design…many variables.