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Article: New AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt


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47 minutes ago, Jud said:

I notice it and the Red feature a "bit-perfect digital volume control," which I guess is the same as the "bit-perfect variable output" mentioned above. Would be interested to learn more.

It's meaningless. Digital volume control by necessity means bit are altered. Bit-perfect means bits are not altered. Can't have it both ways.

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1 minute ago, MikeJazz said:

I have a more question about usability. What exactly happens when we are listening to music with the dragonfly cobalt and we have a incoming call and we want to listen to it. Does the DAC (1) silence the music automatically (2) pass trough our sound,

That's up to the phone and playback app.

 

1 minute ago, MikeJazz said:

if the headphones have mics...

The Dragonfly is a DAC only. It can't do anything with a microphone.

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7 hours ago, lucretius said:

I noticed something like this on my Android phone -- fixed it by uninstalling, reinstalling UAPP, changing the volume steps from the default 20 to 100 within UAPP, and making sure the master hardware volume level was set for less than half of full output. 

 

I had a similar problem with the Red on my Android phone (never had this problem with an iPod touch). The problem seemed to reappear every time I loaded a new version of Android on my phone. I just assumed it was a problem with Android or Samsung hardware.

My PC does not run Android.

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Just now, lucretius said:

I also tried on Windows.  However, I did not have my phones to my ears, when first plugging in the Cobalt.

 

I did notice that it played loud and I just thought the volume control was too high.  I lowered the Windows volume control and all was fine.  Rebooting and/or reinsertions of the Dragonfly did not bring back the experience of jumping to full volume.

 

OTH,  the volume range of the Dragonfly Cobalt appears to map to a Windows volume range of 1 - 10 and not 1- 100. (That was similar for the Red as well.) That should be fixed in the Cobalt's firmware.

The hardware range is 0-64. Software may choose to map that onto a different scale.

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4 hours ago, Gus141 said:

Anyone else not getting a magenta color on the LED for 96kHz music? My LED is white for 96kHz. I get all the other colors as described in the manual but 96kHz tracks make the Cobalt’s LED show white. Now, maybe it’s just a really faded magenta, but I’ve changed out enough printer cartridges to know what magenta looks like. Just thought I’d ask. I’ll post in other forums as well and report back.

I get white or possibly pale blue. The colour for 88.2 kHz is something I'd describe as yellow rather than amber, but I guess that's close enough.

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6 hours ago, lucretius said:

You said earlier that this happens after plugging in the device and making the first volume change.  I assume that subsequent volume changes are fine (seems to be the case with my testing).

The first volume change after plugging in causes the glitch. After that it's fine.

 

6 hours ago, lucretius said:

However, I still noticed that at a volume of about 10 or 11 or 12  in Windows, the actual volume was insanely loud and it was hard to notice any difference when moving the Windows system fader among the higher values. So I am assuming there is another issue in addition to the firmware issue you pointed out.

The volume control runs from max (no attenuation) to -64 dB in 1 dB steps for a total of 65 different levels. I have no idea how Windows maps those onto its scale. It might not even be a linear translation. Does it use a custom Windows driver or the built-in Audio Class support?

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6 minutes ago, lucretius said:

There is no proprietary driver for the Dragonfly. When plugging in the device for the very first time, Windows sets up an endpoint configured to use WASAPI -- I don't think Windows has it's own customized driver for this device. 

 

Also, are you sure those are 1db steps (or is each step just a percentage of full volume)?

I'm sure. The values go straight into the ESS chip where they (supposedly) represent dB attenuation. Also, the measured output level agrees.

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7 minutes ago, lucretius said:

For my Dragonfly Red, the Windows volume control maxes out at about 30 to 35 (after 35 it's all full volume). I could live with that, since there's still enough room to make meaningful sound level adjustments; however, for the Dragonfly Colbalt I tested, the Windows volume control maxed out much sooner -- making meaning sound level adjustments much more difficult.

Is that on a 0-100 scale? Guess I should hook it up to a Windows machine and see what's going on. The Windows driver could very well be doing something strange.

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  • 2 weeks later...
1 minute ago, miguelito said:

I would regard this as an awful bug. Having said this, it is good to know that with a high impedance load (>5kOhm) it doesn’t clip. In most cases where you’d want to set the volume to 100%, you’d be going to an additional amplification stage, and most those would be pretty high impedance (>>5kOhm). Thx for checking this.

Archimago's sample clips even with a 1 MΩ load. There appears to be some variation in production.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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