Dragonfly Black

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PiERiT

2[H]4U
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So I bought one of these and uh... can someone tell me what the hell it's meant to do?

I'm no audiophile, but I cannot tell the slightest difference from onboard audio. Convesely, a few years ago I bought an ASUS Xonar DX, later a DGX, and enabling bass boost and setting the Soft Rock equalizer pretty dramatically improved sound for the music I listen to (metal and EDM). But this thing is doing nothing, best I can tell.

Is it my headphones (ATH-AD500X), or my music file quality (mostly streaming from Amazon Music)? Or is it meant for super cheap phones and laptops that don't have good onboard audio? I've tried with my Win10 PC, a Google Pixel, and an ASUS Chromebook, and it sounds the same on all of them, which is to say, the same as not using it at all. About the only difference I notice is that it's louder at lower volumes, which I guess gives a higher ceiling for max volume, but considering max for onboard makes my ears bleed as it is, that doesn't help.
 
PiERiT said:
So I bought one of these and uh... can someone tell me what the hell it's meant to do?

I'm no audiophile, but I cannot tell the slightest difference from onboard audio. Convesely, a few years ago I bought an ASUS Xonar DX, later a DGX, and enabling bass boost and setting the Soft Rock equalizer pretty dramatically improved sound for the music I listen to (metal and EDM). But this thing is doing nothing, best I can tell.

Is it my headphones (ATH-AD500X), or my music file quality (mostly streaming from Amazon Music)? Or is it meant for super cheap phones and laptops that don't have good onboard audio? I've tried with my Win10 PC, a Google Pixel, and an ASUS Chromebook, and it sounds the same on all of them, which is to say, the same as not using it at all. About the only difference I notice is that it's louder at lower volumes, which I guess gives a higher ceiling for max volume, but considering max for onboard makes my ears bleed as it is, that doesn't help.
Click to expand...

As I've said for a long time, DACs are the last place you should start from if you want substantial improvements in sound quality. Invest in speakers instead. Once your speakers get to 5 figures price range you'll start getting cheaper upgrades from amps and dacs.

Compressed audio from Amazon doesn't help either.
 
I'm still missing when this particular product would be worthwhile? It's USB with a single 3.5mm jack, if it doesn't net me anything on a phone or laptop with headphones, when would it?

Forgive my ignorance. I know there are other DACs and amplifiers and etc out there that can improve high end setups, but this thing is specifically marketed for phones and laptops and it doesn't seem to do anything.

Today I grabbed a wide variety FLAC files and played them with foobar2000 and nada. Maybe with an $800 pair of headphones? Or I may be hard of hearing, that's possible too.
 
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The Dragonfly Black has a better sound quality than most built in sources. However as with 99,9% of people your system is usually limited in other places far more than your source. Headphones, speakers etc. may (and almost without exception, have) linearity problems which are orders of magnitude larger than any functioning source component you can find.

The problems such as not using a correct headphone amp with your headphone or just having a plain bad quality headphone or speakers, may distort the signal so much that you can't find any meaningful difference between sources (of if you can, it feels trivial).

If you've invested, say, 500 bucks or more to head gear or several thousands to your speakers then you may find that a better DAC is a cost effective way to get improvements. If your built in audio solution is a good one it may perform very closely to the Dragonfly.

To put it short: I can make magic happen with expensive setups using speakers and the room with extremely cheap front end. Never the opposite.
 
Tested.
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...-speaka-usb-dac-and-headphone-amplifier.2423/

speaka-dac-vs-audioquest-dragonfly-black-linearity-measurement-png.png
 
Dragonfly Black sound quality is IMO inferior to the standard audio jack for Macbook Air or Pro. To me it basically sits somewhere between really crappy onboard audio and really good onboard audio.
 
pippenainteasy said:
Dragonfly Black sound quality is IMO inferior to the standard audio jack for Macbook Air or Pro. To me it basically sits somewhere between really crappy onboard audio and really good onboard audio.
Click to expand...

I agree. I didn't notice any improvement when I tried the black in my MBP.
 
HammerSandwich said:
FWIW, both Black & Red look pretty good in Stereophile's measurements.
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I know this and this is why I'm a bit surprised of the measurements in the posted article. Perhaps they had a bad sample. 12,5bit resolution should be clearly audible as noise.

Fun fact: Audioquest is a cable company so originally the Dragonfly was supposed to be an interconnect with a bump in it :D
 
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