Gadgetory

hey guys how you doing today we have a very cool kind of new little DAC today I want to show you it is the Dragonfly by AudioQuest it's a 96 24-bit USB DAC pretty simple in execution very tiny size as you can see here the top just comes off like that it's about the size and roughly of a USB thumb drive you're kind of traditional ones I know they got some like really short ones coming out these days but you know back in the day we had these longer USB sticks just like that kind of heavy good rubberized coating that I really like single kind of mini headphone jack output the Dragonfly also has a really cool additional feature that a lot of other guys don't have and that this little dragon flight here will change color based upon what the sample rate is for the file you're listening to so if you want to know if you're getting all the output that you're kind of shooting for in McGlone different colors green amber that kind of thing so that's like pretty that's a pretty fun little extra that I like a lot this thing it does headphone output fairly well for it in ear monitors the low impedance kind of stuff it's not really that bad of an output great like great clarity and you know sizeable volume of course through really low an opinion stuff however with the big boys full-size headphones it didn't quite have the push to make it all the way so that was a little bit of a downside but I you know it really takes a big amplifier to kind of push the big high impedance stuff anyway so I didn't really expect this thing to but it also does a line level output for your stereo you just turn the volume up all the way to the max on both your laptop and the device volume output that's kind of also another thing I want to touch on is the there's the best results ourselves when the volume was all the way up on the computer and then with the diff you had a device output volume you can adjust it from there it's incremental and stepped but it's done in the analog domain not the digital domain so a lot of people think that that really contributes to a little bit better sound quality which is kind of a nice thing I happen to like it a lot I think the Sun quality was really good in fact this thing retails for 250 dollars and for 250 I find it to be above par in its output it's not the best i've ever heard in my entire life there's much more expensive better kind of solutions to DAC output however for what it was in the sides that actually outperformed quite a few of the other $250 decks that i've heard to date which is really great thing i like to see that kind of price to performance quality a lot and there's been quite a bit of hype about this little guy and i do think that it kind of does live up to a lot of what you may or may not have heard the quality for the price is really something that i think a lot of people can get into along those same lines it's you know just quite the metaphor when you plug this into your computer and at least with my macbook air there's like the volume headphone input here and then right next to it there's another volume input and when you plug it in back and forth between those two I mean you notice the difference it's much more balanced I find a lot of the computer headphone outputs the raw ones they have to be very overly bloated bass the bass is much much tighter and the clarity is just there so if you're 250 dollars there's nothing you don't obviously shake a stick at but for 250 bucks you do get an upgrade over the hem put out and put the headphone output of your computer I mean there's something to be said in that if you're you know if you're in tuning your monitors this thing can be a perfect match if not you can actually take this thing out to your bigger headphone amplifier if that's the kind of thing you have and you'll get better results than just your standard output so there is value to this whether it's worth 250 that's you know up to you to decide but I do think that there is a definite upgrade in the sound quality so that's really fun I kind of find this to be a nice solid observation for this thing I mean it's something even maybe your non audiophile friends might recognize which would be kind of cool so that being said you know this is something if you get the chance to check it out at the audio shows or maybe even on display somewhere in the retail I suggest you give it a go because I kind of found it to me where the fun especially for 250 that's unfortunately the starting point for a lot of decks these days if this is your first starting point for a deck I think that you might come away with some really good stuff so let me know if you guys have any questions in the comment section have a good one