Quick thought on the Dragonfly dac

ALL212

I've got the Dragonfly black DAC. I've not been particularly impressed with it and it's sat in a drawer. At my office I have an older PC that streams flac and such to an older Sansui amp for "ambiance". Just headphone out to the RCA in's. It works.

Realizing that I had this Dragonfly sitting in a drawer I hooked it up to this setup. USB out to the Dragonfly and then to the RCA in's.

On a PC of this vintage this is a very nice improvement. Everything tightened up enough to notice and the soundstage is much improved.

RobbyKY

I have the "Red" version. Was using to play .wav files off a Toshiba Satellite laptop into my Carver C-1 (modified) pre-amp.

Total love/hate relationship but probably a result of the laptop more than the Dragonfly. It was my first venture into the DAC world so loved the massive improvement over line-level source but then started getting lots of skips and dropouts. Reripped several CD's more than once before tracing the issue back to the laptop. Cleaned up a host of programs running in the background, removed virus software and reloaded windows for some improvement but still had a few dropouts and random distortion from time to time.

Ended up frustrated so moved an Oppo 105 from the HT room and dedicated to the 2-channel system and the Dragonfly has not "flown" since. The Oppo DAC smokes the Dragonfly in terms of clarity and detail for my ears BUT, part of that may have been the laptop influence since the sources were different (Laptop vs Synology NAS).

Still using the Oppo for now since I like the NAS interface and iPad control via the Oppo App but seriously considering either buying a Schitt Gungnir off my brother or a Marantz DAC-1 from a friend as my next step.

Robby

AsSiMiLaTeD

The Oppo smokes the Dragonfly because it’s 10x the price