[Audio_Empire]

Just bought an AudioQuest Dragonfly DAC ($250.00 from Amazon). If you
don't already know what it is, it's an asynchronous USB 24/96 DAC that's
just about the same size as a USB Flash drive. This unit was designed by
Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio for Audioquest. This tiny unit has a
USB male connector on one end a mini-phone jack on the other.
Apparently, Rankin was able to cram over a hundred components into that
tiny package including a 24-bit ESS SabreDAC and a TI TAS1020 receiver
chip (which does the isochonous-asynchronous USB arbitration,
apparently) as well as a Burr-Brown audio driver/buffer.

The little thing weighs a lot for it's size as well, although it's just
a couple of ounces, I'm used to USB dongles weighing mere grams.
It is covered in a rubber-like case and has a dragonfly outline-shaped
window on the top. This Window does what I wished all DACs did, it
indicates what sampling rate the DAC is working at. It does this by the
dragonfly icon changing color! It's red in "standby", green at 44.1
(Redbook CD), Blue for 48 KHz and magenta for 96. pretty neat.

I have a bunch of DACs around the house including my main unit, a
dual-differential 24-bit 192 DAC sporting four AD1955 DACs. Now of the
ones that take a USB input (including a Musical Fidelity V-link 192
which takes Isochronous-asynchronous USB music data and converts it
SPDIF that I use with my main DAC -because it doesn't take USB data,
just SPDIF) and a Beresford TC-7520 (made by TEC in Taiwan) as well as a
"No-name" 24/bit 192KHz USB (not Isochronous-asynchronous), which is
capable of doing 24/96 through USB and 24/192 through coax SPDIF and
TOSLINK. This latter DAC, I bought from a Chinese website that sells
everything from Flashlights to Cell-phones to ladies' handbags, for the
amazing price of $24.95! I also borrowed a Benchmark DAC-1USB for
comparison.

Over the last few days, I have playing various high-res downloads from
places like eclassical.com and HDTracks as well some of the wave files
that Reference Recordings has been distributing on DVD (these aren't
DVD-A's and in fact, most players won't even play them. They are
designed to be downloaded to one's PC as .wav files and played out of
the computer..

The results are amazing. The Dragonfly as a USB to audio converter is
nothing short of amazing. It sounds better than anything I have in
house. (I always match levels CAREFULLY when doing evaluations like
this) It sounds better than my dual-differential reference unit , it
sounds better than the Benchmark and needless to say it sounds better
than the $25 "Chinese Special" (although the differences aren't that
great. It's mostly a difference in overall clarity. On direct
comparison, the Chinese unit sounds somewhat thick and lacking in
clarity and resolution - like it found some complex passages too much
for it, and so just sort of skipped over them. Now this was only
apparent on direct A/B from the same computer and the same musical file.
If I didn't have the DragonFly, I could easily live with the $25
special, but after hearing what I'm missing, I don't think so now. The
DragonFly also sounds better than my reference DAC/ Musical Fidelity
V-Link 192 combo. Of course, the DragonFly won't decode 192KHz fare, but
it will down-convert it as well as 176.4 KHz files to 96. There's so
little 192 KHz program material out there anyway that it's not a big
deal.

One thing that I ought point out is that the ONLY output for this device
is a mini-headphone jack, and you need an adapter or adapter cable to
connect it to your amplifier. My experience with this type of connector
has not been good (I have a wonderful pair of Monsoon Planar-Magnetic
speakers for the computer sitting on closet shelf right now because the
single mini-headhone plug that the Monsoon bass unit uses for an input
has failed, and it's the type that solders onto a circuit board making
finding a replacement difficult). I've also had the same type of jack on
an iPod fail as well, If you buy a DragonFly use it with light audio
cables and make sure the weight of the cable and connector is
"strain-relieved".

I think this is a great product and an ideal solution for the high-res
computer audio to analog problem. There are lots of ways to go here, you
can buy a USB/SPDIF converter, buy a DAC like the Cambridge DACMagic
Plus or the Benchmark DAC1-USB for more than twice the price, but no
other solution I've seen (at even Five-times the DragonFly's US$250
price) is as elegant (or as portable) as the AudioQuest DragonFly.
Anyone else had any experience with this puppy? Love to hear your
thoughts.