AudioQuest's DragonFly range of USB DACs took the hi-fi world by storm when they were first released, and the DragonFly Cobalt was arguably the pick of the bunch, providing superb sonic performance in a tidy USB design for a simple and effective boost to your music's quality. All you need is a source player and a pair of equally capable wired headphones and you've got a genuine compact hi-fi system right there.
Luckily, you can save big on the multi-Award-winning DragonFly Cobalt at one of the lowest prices we've ever seen thanks to the early Black Friday sales. We saw the Cobalt drop down to around £199 earlier this year during the Amazon Prime Day summer sales, but now that deal price has plummeted even further to £179 over at Sevenoaks, Richer Sounds and Peter Tyson – a mega £90 off its original asking price of £269.
If you're looking for a quick and simple way to boost your portable or semi-portable listening experience without selling off the family heirlooms to pay for it, this might be your golden ticket to better digital sound.
We've tested quite a number of excellent portable DACs this year, but few have impressed us more than the established excellence of the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt. Sitting atop the DragonFly series of DACs (see also the DragonFly Red and DragonFly Black v1.5), the Cobalt is still one of the finest USB models you'll find at this price.
Sticking with the ultra-compact USB design, the Cobalt has a single 3.5mm 2.1v headphone output, bit-perfect digital volume control and MQA renderer. It supports playback of up to 24-bit/96kHz hi-res PCM files and has a more advanced ESS ES9038Q2M DAC chip to deliver a more natural, clearer sound, while a new microprocessor draws less current and bumps up the DAC's processing speed.
As with all DragonFly DACs, once you connect it to your laptop, the logo's LED will light up with 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. It's a nifty feature for at-a-glance checking.
It's the audio quality, though, that really sets this little USB DAC apart. It does wonders in cleaning up our laptop’s digital audio performance, regardless of the file type or platform. Military precision and stunning detail clarity are its highlights, but that goes hand-in-hand with a terrific sense of rhythm and wonderfully expressive dynamic range. If your entire music listening is done through a laptop and headphones and you don't already have a DAC in between, we think you can get better value than this brilliant DragonFly Cobalt DAC.
We thought it was great value at its full price (as its multiple What Hi-Fi? Award wins will attest), but with this excellent deal that sees the price come well under £200, it's a real no-brainer.
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Read our full AudiQuest DragonFly Cobalt review
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