Other than the color, the only external difference between the Cobalt and the Red is that the contoured enclosure is 10% smaller and doesn't have the earlier DAC's distinctive ridge above and behind the 3.5mm jack.

(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. This is a DC-coupled, unity-gain device and runs off a single positive voltage rail. The Cobalt's output amplifier is the same as that used in the Red, an ESS Sabre9601. While the Cobalt's reconstruction filter is still a minimum-phase type, the ultrasonic roll-off is slower, which AudioQuest says results in a more natural sound. Like the DragonFly Red and Black, the Cobalt is limited to decoding data with a sample rate of 96kHz or lower. While the Red's DAC chip is the ESS Sabre 9016, the Cobalt uses ESS's new ES9038Q2M DAC chip, which, like the earlier chip, incorporates a 64-step digital volume control. However, the Cobalt replaces the Red's Microchip PIC32MX microcontroller with the new Microchip PIC32MX274, which is specified as increasing processing speed by 33% while drawing less current. What do you get for the extra coin?Īll three DragonFlys feature Gordon Rankin's StreamLength asynchronous USB code, which allows the DAC chip to control the conversion timing of the samples fed via the USB bus, reducing word-clock jitter. costs $299.95 compared with $199.95 for the DragonFly Red and $99.95 for the Black. So when AudioQuest's Stephen Mejias asked me a few months back if he could send me a review sample of the new DragonFly Cobalt, it took me less than a New York minute to say 'Yes.' Mostly the music plays on the big rig, but I also listen on headphones, driving them with the AudioQuest DragonFly Red USB DAC that Art Dudley reviewed in September 2016, plugged into the iPad mini. But these days I settle down to my reading in my listening chair, with my iPad both running the Kindle app and allowing me to control what I am listening to with the Roon app. I have been a book junkie all my lifethe two long walls of my listening room are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and I have many boxes of books in storagebut these days almost all my book reading is with the Kindle app on my iPad mini.īefore I retired at the end of March 2019, most of my eBook consumption took place on the subway as I commuted to and from Stereophile's Manhattan office. Unlike the world of recorded music, where streaming has decimated sales of physical products, book publishing is seeing the reverse trend: sales of eBooks are declining while those of both hardback and paperback books are recovering.

Dragonfly cobalt teardown