AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt

Once attached to your laptop or smartphone, and selected as means of audio output, the DAC’s LED will shine one of six colours to indicate sampling rate: red for standby, green for 44.1kHz, blue for 48kHz, yellow for 88.2 kHz, light blue for 96kHz or purple when decoding MQA.

The Cobalt does wonders in cleaning up our laptop’s performance, no matter what kind of file we feed it or whether it’s streaming from YouTube, Spotify, Tidal or playing from our own hi-res library.

AudioQuest claims its new DAC ‘strips away fuzz and fog that wasn’t even noticeable until removed’, and we’d have to agree. It is such an incredibly precise rendering that we almost feel duty bound to play our highest resolution recordings through it.