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Audioquest Dragonfly 1.2 - My early experiences

Posted by soundchekk (A) on April 16, 2014 at 03:54:53

Hi there.

I'm currently testing this or that "thumbDAC".

My reference is a 99€ battery driven DIY DAC with PCM5102 DAC and XMOS receiver from JLsounds.com. It also gives me SPDIF and I2S outputs.

I tested a M2Tech USB DAC against it earlier. The M2tech DAC was a real nice performer. What made me send the device back, was its price. At
200€+ it's IMO too expensive. Even worse from a pricepoint are e.g. Meridian Explorer and Resonessence Labs Herus.


The Dragonfly 1.2 comes at a rather reasonable rate nowadays.
Obviously the device is facing fierce competition, when it comes to the market standards in terms of features.

Just received one for testing.
Even though Audioquest outlines Windows and iOS support only, the Dragonfly also works under Linux.

However.

The tricky part, from a handling perspective, is its internal "analog" volume control. You need to use the OS mixer to address the volume
control on the DAC. If your application uses an internal SW volume
control, you won't take any "benefit" of that external analog volume control. You basically need to handle two volume controls at a time.
Better check twice!

You can use that analog control to set a fixed "gain" for your chain
properly. Most of the amplifiers out there run a gain of 24-30db.
Which is usually far too much considering the 2V+ supplied by most of the DACs and 89db/W+ speakers out there. Without that analog volume control, you'd be forced to run a pretty high SW attenuation. We don't want that. Therefore I do consider this analog volume control a real nice feature.


My transport is a CubiTruck running a tailormade ArchLinux and Squeezelite btw.

With "alsamixer" you can set the Dragonfly internal volume control.
Make sure it is set at all. Otherwise you might have "No Sound".

Alsamixer shows a range from 0 - 100% and translates that into

db gain: 0.00-0.19

Hmmh??? Not sure but something is wrong with the mapping I'd guess.

Beside that only 10 steps are offered.

I'd guess the USB driver needs an update/quirk. I hope that the 100% is 100% at least.

The Dragonfly is therefore not 100% compatible with Android or Linux.
But. It is somehow working.


Hint:

For those running squeezlite below line will make the DF fly:
squeezelite -o hw:0,0 -m xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -a 40:4:24_3:1 -n squeeze1 -b 50000:50000 -p 90 -r 96000


My first impression - soundwise: Sounds quite OK. I probably need to give it some more time.

I'm currently running the device buspowered. External power might lift it's performance further up. Perhaps I'll try that later.

Enjoy.

Cheers

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

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