It’s between this, or the Clear (and/or Elex) for the best full-size headphone pairing I tried with the baby Dragonfly. Removing power-concerns, by listening through the SPL Phonitor x, it is clear that the little AudioQuest is resolving enough for any headphone it is likely to be paired with.

One interesting aspect to DACs that only support MQA rendering, is that you can do back-to-back comparisons feeding them MQA content that has, or has not, been through the decoding phase - simply by turning that option off in your player. DragonFly Black, the most affordable model of the award-winning DragonFly family, has been praised by Darko. When used in this manner, DragonFly functions in fixed output mode, which allows the overall volume level to be adjusted with the audio/video system’s master volume control. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. And, the mid-range remains the highlight of the show … which is to be expected as it is the strongest aspect of both the Dragonfly and the Zeus.Hooked directly to any of my headphones (AKG K92, Takstar Pro 82, Samson SR850, Sennheiser CX300II, KZ ZSX.

Running it through an LGG4 running FLAC/ALAC via USB Audio Pro through a generic OTG cable (more on this later). The new Audioquest Dragonfly Black is software upgradeable through complimentary Windows and OS X desktop applications. When pushed into too-demanding a load, the response becomes somewhat muted and the raw, sharp, leading edges of percussion, brass and plucked strings can get softened/rounded off. It certainly helps that all Dragonflies are so small and extremely easy to use (plug and play, no drivers needed).As a final neat touch, the dragonfly logo glows various colours to indicate the file frequency: green for CD (44. Some mention that it is top quality, an excellent quality compact DAC / Headphone Amp, and totally reliable, while others say that it's quite expensive and has some build quality issues. Our JitterBug USB filter is an easy and affordable upgrade that reduces the noise and ringing that plagues USB ports throughout audio systems. When using Cobalt, you can still optimize the digital audio from a computer, car stereo, or other hardware by adding a JitterBug (in parallel) into a different USB port. When possible, always configure the computer to output the native sample rate of the music you are listening to.

Bass may not be the absolute cleanest you’ll hear, and there’s some minor bleed into the midrange, but the overall presentation is detailed, nuanced, natural, entirely coherent and extremely enjoyable.DragonFly Black, Red, and Cobalt will work with most Android devices running on Lollipop OS (and some Android devices running on KitKat), provided that the device manufacturer has adhered to the USB specification and implementation, and supports audio over USB. One of the nice things with USB-powered DAC/amps is that as long as the device you’re connecting it to, e.