Curiosity got the better of me, so I picked up a DragonFly Cobalt today (pictures etc. tomorrow). I did a few minutes listening with it, just to make sure it was working properly, and then ran it with the two headphones I’ve been fiddling with this last week (I’ll do more later).
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MySphere 3.2 needed almost everything it had to get to proper volume levels, and the top-end is noticeably rolled off when you do get there (far more so than the FR plot would suggest, and to the point of having little life, sparkle or air), and the bass was started to come apart on bass-centric tracks (it was fine on the couple of rock and pop tracks I tried). The math says it shouldn’t be clipping, but the bottom end sure sounds pretty ugly.
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Rosson Audio RAD-0 had ample volume headroom and the bass remained full, tight and clean up as loud as I was willing to push it (about -13 dB, or two thirds of the available adjustment). Some high-end roll-off was apparent but here it was more inline with what I would have expected a) from an ESS 9038 in minimum-phase/slow-roll off mode and b) how it ultimately measured.
Then I fired up the analyzer to see what the frequency response plot actually looks like for the Cobalt itself, and in comparison to the Red and Black models:
Colors match those of the respective DragonFlies. Test signal was 24-bit/44.1 kHz. The Cobalt is -12.5 dB down by the time it crosses 22,050 Hz.
Initial, subjective, listening impressions tomorrow …