I’ve never used a stick DAC. These Dragonflies, how do they sound on their own (i.e.without using an external amp? I’m curious because they feed off tiny laptop PSU’s that have neither the voltage nor the current found in even small PSU’s like the Micromega MyDAC or the Cambridge DACMagic 100. remember those days at the dawn of the mass-market home computer age when the only “audio” found in a typical computer was “beep” and squirrel noises. Since then I have, at the urging of pride-filled friends who were so excited about the “faulous” SQ of their newly acquired laptop that came with promise of nothing less than a sublime sound quality bliss from the Mega-Turbo-Nearly-Nuclear sound card tucked inside. nuclear Sound Blaster “Llive” card which, according to the salesman, sounded just as good as a Rush concert. That caught my attention enough to buy such a laptop for the purpose of audio bliss.
Audio bliss my a$$. The “fabulous” SQ sounded much closer to a cat fight than to Rush. I reverted to standard home audio with a Sugden A25 room heater mislabeled as integrated amplifier even though it generated more heat than music, Luxman CD player and a very decent pair of stand-mounted Paradigm Titans dating back to a time when Paradigned was still aware that several people in Canada did not have six-figure incomes. the time when. The next and last 3 or 4 times I got forced by politeness to comfirm the uber quality of one’s laptop audio, which was always bad, ranging from “atrocious” to “constipated horse.”
Ok now lemme have it and tell me about those little dragons please 