AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt

Unlike the world of recorded music, where streaming has decimated sales of physical products, book publishing is seeing the reverse trend: sales of eBooks are declining while those of both hardback and paperback books are recovering. I have been a book junkie all my life—the two long walls of my listening room are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and I have many boxes of books in storage—but these days almost all my book reading is with the Kindle app on my iPad mini.

Before I retired at the end of March 2019, most of my eBook consumption took place on the subway as I commuted to and from Stereophile’s Manhattan office. But these days I settle down to my reading in my listening chair, with my iPad both running the Kindle app and allowing me to control what I am listening to with the Roon app. Mostly the music plays on the big rig, but I also listen on headphones, driving them with the AudioQuest DragonFly Red USB DAC that Art Dudley reviewed in September 2016,¹ plugged into the iPad mini.

So when AudioQuest’s Stephen Mejias asked me a few months back if he could