A beginner's guide to DONGLE DACs: HELM Bolt // THX Onyx // AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt
![A beginner's guide to DONGLE DACs: HELM Bolt // THX Onyx // AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt A beginner's guide to DONGLE DACs: HELM Bolt // THX Onyx // AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt](/pic/a_beginner_s_guide_to_dongle_dacs_helm_bolt_--_thx_onyx_--_audioquest_dragonfly_cobalt/XzFwQ0Noand5b3M_.jpeg)
this video is brought to you by earmen makers of portable audio hardware click the link in the description box below for more information it's summertime finally and i've been out and about a lot these last few weeks on my bike walking about the city with a couple of new pairs of iems from campfire audio they both have single drivers so the the honeydew and the satsuma which is kind of funky names but one has a single ba one has a single dynamic driver but of course portable audio isn't just about your headphones because most phones these days like this essential phone does not have a headphone socket so what do we do well we have to go the way of dongle dax and in this video i want to talk about dongle dax so for the past maybe two or three months i've been having a listen to this thing here this is called the helm bolt this is a dongle dac you can see why it's called a dongle dac usbc here three and a half mil headphone output here and this obviously connects to our phone like that i've also got the thx onyx which is a slightly larger dongle dac again usb c connector here three and a half mil output here and this sells for 200 dollars the helm sells for 100 and then stepping us up to 300 is the audio quest dragonfly cobalt now this is actually a two-piece unit but it comes with a dragon tail but effectively together it's a dongle dax a usbc here and again three and a half mil output here now we don't only you know use a dongle dac like the helm bolt or the thx onyx just to enable audio on our smartphone we do it because these dacs are built with what we might call audio file sensitivities they sound way better than any headphone socket on a macbook or on a pc or on a smartphone if it had one and they improve all sources this is one of the common misconceptions i come across all the time is that people ask me john do i need a dac if i'm only listening to spotify the answer is absolutely yes it will make all of your spotify sound better and your apple music and your youtube and your soundcloud but i mainly use spotify cobras and tidal and for this sort of i don't want to call it a group test or i guess it's like a little mini test of three different dumbbell decks in assessing the sound quality of these dacs i've been listening to music yeah from spotify and lossy format but tidal and kobo's in cd quality now i've already made a video about how to connect these dongle dacs so i don't want to labor the point here but since i made that video i did discover in my draw a little lightning to usbc adapter so we need that for the iphone because the iphone has a lightning socket and we have usbc here now the thing is is that this adapter is not official it's not mfi certified i think it cost me about eight euros but just be aware of that it's not an official adapter otherwise we would use the camera connection kit the official one from apple but that only has usb-a on the bottom and so we would need another usb-a to usb-c adapter i mean i think many people well many regular viewers know of my view of dongle hell in the iphone world which is why i use an android phone pretty much day to day so yeah just be aware of that if you're an iphone user one more nerd note actually is that iphone users don't have to worry about what's called bit perfect playback so if we play a cd quality stream from tidal cd quality 44.1 kilohertz is what comes out of the lightning socket and if we play higher res stuff it comes out the lightning socket as that high res now on android that is not the case what comes out of our usbc socket here like if i attach the thx onyx if i play 441 kilohertz cd quality music on an android phone kilohertz is what comes out of here now that's true for local content for spotify for cobras but very recently in the last two weeks tidal have started rolling out which i think does give us bit perfect audio so when i connect my dragonfly for example to this android phone i play cd quality from the phone this dragonfly lights up green whereas previously it was blue so we're now getting bit perfect from tidal but not from kobo's not from spotify not from pretty much any other apps unless you use usb audio player pro which i'm not really a fan of because it doesn't do offline content now because it's portable gear some people might be interested in how heavy this is the helm bolt weighs 8 grams the thx onyx weighs 17 grams and then the dragonfly with his dragon tail weighs close to 30 grams so you might think well okay well obviously the helm is the best choice if i want to you know put this stuff in my pocket but not necessarily because what i do is i connect this here and then i have to sort of fold this over to put it in my pocket and i think that on the helm bolt this connection here where this cable comes in here is a point of weakness it doesn't feel very robust it doesn't feel very strong so in fact when i connect the onyx again this is actually easier to fold into the pocket because it's longer and it tucks away i guess more readily inside the pocket like this so the headphones are connected here but there doesn't seem to be not obviously a point of weakness because this is all one piece of rubber here so i think this is a a better made unit but it should be because it costs twice as much and then similarly the the dragon tail that's very strong you can get other usb a to usbc adapters for much cheaper than this but maybe eight euros but this one is particularly strong i like this but here's the thing if we want to use a dragonfly with an iphone and we're using the camera connection kit i don't know i think this is probably the the weakest link in all of the sort of portable audio stuff that we do with an iphone this camera connection kit not very strong yes it folds over but i don't know i know people loads of people that have sort of broken five or six of these from just doing this with a dragonfly so yeah another iphone sort of thing to consider now discerning the audible differences between these three dacs actually was quite the intensive process so rather than just play stuff and let it happen which i did do but i did spend a good few days kind of quick fire a being which i don't normally do and for that i used a playlist that consisted of about seven or eight different songs and they were princes the ballad of dorothy parker from sign the times orbitals lc1 which is a b side from the 90s also orbitals the box siguros is sven g engler is that how you say it talking heads is the big country from more songs about buildings and food and rem and patty smith's e-bow the letter from new adventures in hi-fi kind of appropriate really so that's just so you know where i'm coming from music wise let's talk about the helm bolt first 99 it's like the ground floor level of i think high end dongle dax for me this sounds a little bit better than my lg v40s and 30s so if you own one of those yeah know that this sounds it's of the same sort of flavor in that it's not bright it's a little bit congealed but i love the top end on this deck it's very well judged i think it's the most ethereal of the three how's that for john well it's not even a metaphor is it a word i i really like how this dac it doesn't have a lot in the low end compared to the other two but it just sounds so lovely up top so delicate and that makes it a really good match for the campfire audio satsuma which is the single ba and it sort of really needs something that's not bright and strident at all and this is none of those things very very good way to get into portable audio for relatively little money and that well judge top end that ethereal top end makes this dac very good for long listening and i also like that this unit this helm bolt gives us a good sense of tonal color music's color and timbre and all of those sort of more i don't know what to say here [ __ ] i had no idea this area was so loud doubling our spend to the thx onyx this makes prince and orbital sound taller when i was playing rem's e by the letter this dac makes that sound wider especially the acoustic guitar strums that kind of play out on the periphery of i think it's the left channel but perhaps most obvious with this deck is its more overt separation of instruments so yeah it stretches the head stage wider taller and puts more space between the players but it does so it's very slightly at the expense of the body of those instruments and sounds and vocals so this is a just a smidge thinner and i'm talking like minor details here it's a it's a smidge thinner than the helm bolt and by association the lg v40 and v30 and that that sort of lack of body really presents on the kick drum that introduces us to orbital's lc1 now you could describe that kick drum as being tighter through this one or you could describe it as being leaner again that comes down to interpretation but i think the number one word that describes the sound of the thx onyx is clean yeah clean like you're looking through a a cleaner window on the music so if that's your thing then you you know you're really gonna love this the dragonfly cobalt 300 bucks it's quite the step up from the onyx in price but not so much in sound quality it's not quite as as clean or as lean as the onyx and it does make vocals pop a lot more so prince's vocal pops forward a lot more microstripes pops forward a lot more and i like that and i think the the top end on this is a little bit keener i mean everything just sort of bursts out more with stronger dynamics than the thx and that's top to bottom so if you're a little bit averse to an overly insistent top end you might not want to go for the cobalt and i would have never said this a couple of years ago or was it two years ago when we did the first video about this but next to these other units that have since been released this yeah this one's a little bit of boolean up top i don't mind it too much with some material but i guess it it does get a little bit tiring after a while one thing i did notice from from using the cobalt with my essential phone and tidal playing cd quality streams and cobras playing cd quality streams was on ebo the letter the rem paddy smith track the cobalt was the best of the three in exposing mike mills's baseline i spent about an hour going through all of these dacs just listening to that bass line in that track and on lc1 the orbital track there's a tape piss at the start because it was recorded probably on not amazing studio gear back in the early 90s and this was really the only dac that really pulled that out see what i mean by the top end here being a little bit yeah more lively but definitely definitely i think this dax standout quality compared to the other three is dynamics this is the punchiest most exciting sounding dac i mean i liken this to the nad amplifier that i spoke about in my entry-level hi-fi system video it's you know it's really strong and punchy and i really like that but again i would never have described that and hearing this in isolation and if you want even more punch and even more excitement then i would cut over to the dragonfly red but that's with the campfire headphones i would say this one and the onyx a much better match for the honeydew which is the single dynamic driver campfire headphone which isn't as resolving up top as the satsuma so this gives it a sort of kick in the pants in that respect which you know it creates a balanced sound and i think that's what many of us are after really is is balancing our dac and amplification with the sound of our headphones or our earphones what i found really interesting about this little investigation in sort of trying to work out the differences in sound quality between these three dongle decks was how hard i had to work just to tease apart the smallest differences which makes the helm bolt at 99 bucks such a bargain because i think i mean if you want sort of best most dynamic most exciting sound cobalt if you want the sort of the cleanest sound where neutrality is communicated as a feeling because we can't know about whether it's neutral or not because we weren't there and all those other reasons which i've been through before and borges death with i'm not going to do it again here but neutrality is a feeling the thx but yeah the biggest bargain here is by far the helm bolt so yeah there isn't a huge difference i guess in the grand scheme of things not as much as i would have expected actually but what i do like is these improve the sound quality of everything that i throw at them so i don't have to worry about you know is my spotify going to sound great from these decks yes it will same with cobras and tidal you know my thoughts on high-res audio now so i don't listen to high-res audio really all that much and out in the street out and about around berlin forget it it's like going as my friend michael lavonna said it's like going to a michelin-starred restaurant and then focusing on the cutlery madness especially with all i mean you can hear the noise that's going on around me right now there's construction over there we've had to kind of pause several times for trucks i think cd quality is absolutely definitely enough when you're out and about in the street listening to music and even then you know making the case for it against 320 kilobits spotify is pretty tough but what makes a bigger difference is these three dacs these three dongle dax make a bigger difference to our listening experience than stepping up from 320 kilobits per second spotify to seed quality on tidal and cobras so now i'm back at home and one thing i really like about dongle dax is how easily they can go from being used outside the house to inside the house because it's very easy to disconnect it from your phone and then connect it to a raspberry pi or a macbook or a pc laptop and use that dac use that dongle dac as part of a loudspeaker hi-fi system however only the thx and the audio quest need apply here because the helm bolt has auto impedance sensing so it automatically detects the impedance of what it's connected to and i think if the connected device is less than 150 ohms it drops down to one volt and i have noticed that it drops down to one volt when i connect it to quite a few different integrated amplifiers actually so it just becomes too quiet unless you've got a lot of gain on your amp then you'll be fine or if you don't want too much gain from your dac it's a great choice but i think for most people in most situations the helm bolt will be too quiet as a dac in a hi-fi loudspeaker system now just as i only use iems outside of the house i very rarely use over-ear headphones when i'm out and about unless it's really cold when i'm back at home i never use ims at all i always use over ear headphones now these are the sennheiser drop 6xx i believe they're like a sennheiser 650 300 ohm headphone so they're quite the challenge for our dongle dax with each of them i didn't get a lot of headroom on this i had to push volume pretty much close to maximum inside the tidal and koboz apps to get a decent listening level with these but yeah it still sounds pretty damn fantastic and what's really interesting is that you put these with a dongle dac any of the three that i've got and it sounds way way way better than the entry-level loudspeaker systems that i've been talking about in recent weeks in fact for 200 bucks these are possibly the biggest bargain at the entry level for open back headphones these sounds so good and with a dongle dac just so nice the audeze sign an 18 ohm headphone a little bit easier to drive i get more headroom from these with the dongle dax just a little bit more i run the dax about 85 80 with these these are closed back headphones i could wear these outside the house if i wanted to for me these proved to be the best match with the helm bolt it's very sort of filigreed and delicate top end really plays well to the planar magnetic driver in here we don't get a lot of bass but these planers are pretty good in that respect with the thx and the audio quest these can get a little bit strident at times but again i'm i'm just being such a nit picker with that because what i like about the thx with the sennheiser is that it really sort of opens up the top end and that sort of cleaner vibe really plays a nice counterpoint to this headphone which is already very slightly warm the audio quest cobalt gives us a little bit more tonal color when listening to something like the box by orbital but i think the onyx is more conducive to longer listening sessions with these and then we have meze 99 classics which are a very very very easy drive headphone no problem with headroom with any of these in fact if if anything i had to pull the volume way down to like well below the bottom 30 percent now i think the thx with these is a little bit too strident with electronic music and the helm bowl is by far the best fit for a more balanced more natural more organic more easeful sound from this particular headphone so where does that leave us well if you want the best value dongle dac that is definitely the helm bolt especially if you're only listening to headphones and especially if your headphones are already a little bit bright and couldn't really go any further without you maybe wincing a little bit if you double your spend to 200 bucks we get the thx onyx which gives us a much bigger sound but also a sound which i think is well gives us more of a a cleaner and slightly leaner overall gestalt and then stepping up to the dragonfly cobalt at 300 us dollars or euros that gives us more excitement it puts more kind of pep in our stride when we're listening it's just yeah more dynamically exciting and again if you want even more of that go to the dragonfly red and we also go to dragonflies if we want usb a compatibility if you like this video please hit the like button down below if you like my attitude towards high-end audio in that it encompasses dax that take me outside of the house then bring me home again then take me outside of the house again i'm so happy we got to film a video outside of the house once more so if you dig all of that please subscribe to this channel and as always thank you ever so much for watching i get a number of messages and emails from readers asking where i get my glasses from if you want to know that the answer lies in the description box below you
2021-07-27 12:06