Audio Quest Dragonfly Cobalt

USB D/A–HEADPHONE AMPLIFIER

- John Atkinson

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. I have been a book junkie all my life— the two long walls of my listening room are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and I have many boxes of books in storage—but these days almost all my book reading is with the Kindle app on my iPad mini.

Before 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. 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. 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 2016,1 plugged into the iPad mini.

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.”

The Cobalt

...costs $299.95 compared with $199.95 for the DragonFly Red and $99.95 for the Black. What do you get for the extra coin?