This tiny USB DAC justifies its hefty price tag
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Once upon a time, the only time we would have paid this kind of money for a USB stick was if we were being blackmailed. The AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt USB DAC enters the market at a premium price point for the company’s range of portable DACs, but it backs up its asking price with the clearest, tidiest and most dynamic presentation we have heard from a unit this small.
This is a product whose beauty is born of its simplicity, and whose plug-in-and-play approach to cleaning up the sound from your computer, or (with the included dongle) a smartphone or tablet, is much of the allure. There are elements here shared with the Award-winning DragonFly Red, including the 2.1v headphone output, bit-perfect digital volume control and MQA renderer, but there have also been a number of significant upgrades to the Cobalt too.
A new, more advanced ESS ES9038Q2M DAC chip promises a clearer but more natural sound, while the PIC32MX274 microprocessor draws less current and increases processing speed by 33 per cent. Improved power supply filtering is said to increase immunity to wi-fi, Bluetooth and cellular noise. The enclosure is 10 per cent smaller, while a DragonTail USB-A to USB-C adaptor is included.
Cleaned up performance
The most substantial upgrade is evident only when you plug the DragonFly Cobalt in; it’s in the performance.
Once attached to your laptop or smartphone, and selected as means of audio output, the DAC’s LED will shine one of six colours to indicate the sampling rate: red for standby, green for 44.1kHz, blue for 48kHz, yellow for 88.2 kHz, light blue for 96kHz or purple when decoding MQA.
The Cobalt does wonders in cleaning up our laptop’s performance, no matter what kind of file we feed it or whether it is streaming from YouTube, Spotify, Tidal or playing from our own hi-res library.
AudioQuest claims its new DAC “strips away fuzz and fog that weren’t even noticeable until removed”, and we would have to agree. It is such an incredibly precise rendering that we feel almost duty-bound to play our highest-resolution recordings through it.
Lines are indelibly drawn round the edges of each instrument, with granular detail on offer to complement the cleanliness and military precision. The Cobalt isn’t necessarily concerned with polishing your music, only the lens through which it can
