AudioQuest’s DragonFly line of budget portable DAC/headphone amps has made quite the buzz over the years, delivering a performance boost for your laptop or smartphone's digital library in a compact, USB-stick form and at an affordable price. The DragonFly Black (£69) and DragonFly Red (£149) have collectively won multiple What Hi-Fi? Awards since 2016, and now an all-new DragonFly has arrived to try build on that success at a slightly higher price.
The DragonFly Cobalt (£269.95 / $299.95) – its name is typically reflected in its colour finish – is the new flagship 'Fly, promising enhanced performance thanks to a number of advanced components.
The Cobalt is 10 per cent smaller than its siblings, too – just 5.8cm long – and comes with a USB-A-to-USB-C adaptor to cater for the increasing number of Android smartphones with the USB-C connection.
It features the same 2.1-volt output, headphone amp and volume control as the Red, and too supports Tidal Masters (MQA) playback on Android and Apple smartphones thanks to its built-in MQA renderer. Its file limit is still 24-bit/96kHz, too.
The Cobalt, like its siblings, also utilises Gordon Rankin's StreamLength asynchronous USB code, and uses a single clock for both the DAC and microcontroller functions, promising a better performance than DACs that use multiple clocks.
Unlike the big-eyed bugs themselves, which have an average lifespan of only a few years, the AudioQuest DragonFlys have been around since 2012, improving digital sound in a conveniently (and once-uniquely) compact way. We can only hope the Cobalt will prove just as competitive as its £269 price point.
The DragonFly Cobalt is on sale now, with the first 10,000 sold boxed with trial Tidal and Qobuz subscriptions.
