AudioQuest DragonFly DAC USB Digital Audio Converter - Black

Product Information

The most noticeable of all is the overall “hardness” – coming from the Aune S16, and before that, the O2 and the M9xx, I’d love to hear a more “natural”, more “subtle” high ends. New, more advanced ESS ES9038Q2M DAC chip with a minimum-phase slow roll-off filter for more natural sound.

This yields an asynchronous USB interface that keeps the sample word-clock where it belongs … under control of the DAC. These DACs proved for once and for all that convenience and performance need no longer be mutually exclusive.

Part of the reason I bought the Dragonfly were to feed it into the Burson Fun, yet unfortunately all Dragonfly drawbacks became Dragonfly 1. OK, disambiguation addressed, I'll start my review by saying that like most anyone who's ever bought a DragonFly, I bought mine to bypass my onboard sound processor because with earphones, the sound was polluted with noise. If you’re very sensitive to hiss with IEMs you will hear a little here when no music is playing or in longer silent passages. MQA is an award-winning technology that delivers master-quality audio in a file that’s small enough to stream or download. DragonFlys Black, Red, and Cobalt support Tidal Masters (MQA) playback from iPhones and Android smartphones.

In DragonFly Red and Cobalt, we were able to employ a highly sophisticated 64-step, 64-bit, bit-perfect digital volume control. That's not to say it's always necessarily better than the equivalent non-MQA version of a track, assuming you can find otherwise identical MQA/non-MQA sources to compare. Then iPhone 7 made nerds of us all: when the headphone jack was deleted, many of us were forced use the Lightning Adapter which, although tiny, is a mobile external DAC/amp just like those we occasionally see rubber-banded to enthusiasts’ phones. In A/B tests, we didn’t detect any glaring coloration in the sound — which is exactly what we prefer — but the DragonFly Black does a much better job driving low and medium-impedance headphones than the iPhone’s Lightning Adapter. are designed to work with computers and laptops only; they are not designed for use with iOS and Android mobile devices.AudioQuest has just announced the launch of two new micro-DAC options that resolve this issue; the Dragonfly Black and Dragonfly Red.