[Ekke Tiivas]

Hi!
New to HiFi here.

I'm trying to choose between a used Dragonfly cobalt which would be lovely for it's portable nature and a Zen Dac v2(Which I have listened to before and liked the wide and open soundstage it provided) I have also listened to the dragonfly black and ifi go bar neither of which I liked due to their more closed in sounstage and excessive smoothness/warmth.

Question is if I could get atleast somewhat close to the soundstageing of the zen dac with the cobalt?

If anyone has experience with the dragongly cobalt i would love your opinion on the sound of it compared to a similarly priced desktop dac.

I'm hopeful having read the cobalt can be used as a pure dac bypassing its amp section which I'm guessing is responsible for the warm and closed in soundstage of most dongle DAC/Amps.

Many thanks for taking the time to answer.

 

[WorksUnit]

Welcome.
What headphones have been you using?

 

[Ekke Tiivas]

Welcome.
What headphones have been you using?

I have an old pair of HD449 but I'd mostly be using the dac part of those DAC/Amps to run my powered speakers.

 

[WorksUnit]

^Gotcha^
A little hard to make a comparison given you plan on on using it with speakers.
One thing to bear in mind is the wear on the USB when using a dongle device and constantly swapping it in and out and roving with it.
Personally I would go for something like the ZenDac2 insitu and a cheaper dongle dac for portable.

 

[Ekke Tiivas]

Thank you for the insight.

Going with the Zen Dac and perhaps later on will get a Dragonfly black then.