@partslinger I have both a Dragonfly Black (V1.2) and a Red, and I have tried both with and without an AudioQuest Jitterbug. I have compared them to both Chord QuteHD and Chord Mojo2 DACs. I used these with headphones and in a near field 2.1 desktop system with modest AudioQuest and DIY cables, not high end but in near field at low to moderate volume, revealing, especially of soundstage.
The Dragonfly Black sounds nice, warm, moderately quiet, inoffensive. It was a great improvement over the sound cards typically available in most laptop computers when it was first introduced back in 2012. The Dragonfly Red was a significant step up in terms of detail on offer with it’s ESS chip, and greater amplification on tap to drive a greater variety of headphones. To me the most noticeable difference is the way the Red lays out a pinpoint soundstage. But I also find listening to the Red to be fatiguing in my system or with headphones compared to the Black. The Jitterbug scrubs off some of the edge on the Dragonfly Red, at the expense of detail. The Jitterbug with the Black is just too much softness for me.
In comparing the sound that I get from the AudioQuest Dragonflies to the two Chord DACs, there is no contest. The detail on tap with both of the Chords connected to my MS Surface laptop with a decent USB cable exceeds both of the dongles and while the Chords might give up a touch of the ESS (artificial?) “air” of the Dragonfly Red, that is more than made up for by precise leading and trailing edges of notes, tonal accuracy across the frequencies, ability to distinguish individual instruments and voices, and perhaps most importantly, complete lack of listening fatigue. Both AudioQuest devices sound “grainy” in comparison to the Chord DACs, and the Red is boarding on downright edgy.
Given measurements from ASR show that the Dragonflies measure well below some of the current inexpensive offerings from the likes of Topping or SMSL in terms of signal to noise ratio, you can probably do much better than the Dragonfly Black for not a whole lot more money in desktop packages. If portability and built-in headphone amplification is important, my experience is that the Chord Mojo2 is a significant upgrade, and there may be other products that would improve your experience for less than a Mojo2 (the Mojo2 is much better than the original Mojo, so I would only consider the “2” version). If you have the budget, there are much better sounding DACs for racks at many price points, but something like the Denefrips Aries or Chord Qutest will offer you very different flavors and can be found used now for near a grand or less.
As always, YMMV,
kn