Dragonfire Acoustics Mini Dragon DFA 2.1
Ever go on a blind date? If you’ve been on more than one, you know what it’s like to encounter an entirely new product at an audio show: Sometimes it’s love at first listen, your only question being, “When can we get together again?” Other times, you can’t wait to say goodbye.
My blind date with the Dragonfire Acoustics Mini Dragon DFA 2.1 nearfield monitor system ($10,000), accessorized with its Kimber Kable Axios Goliath cable upgrade ($1500), took place during its coming-out reception at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (RMAF) in Denver.1 After listening to a 24/96 file of Cassandra Wilson’s “Dance to the Drummer Again” on the Dragonfire system, I scribbled in my notebook, “totally absolutely impressive … musical flow reigned supreme.”
Astonished by what I had heard, I chatted with the system’s SoCal-based designer, Dragoslav Colich, who is best known as the designer of Audeze planar-magnetic headphones. Colich told me he considered the Mini Dragon system’s planar-magnetic loudspeaker his “life achievement … the finest transducer I have built.”
I knew a way to spend more time with this system, whose remarkably transparent, detailed, colorful presentation seemed way beyond that of any computer-fed desktop system I’d ever heard: All I had to do was review it!
Matchmaking, though, isn’t always smooth. After the complete Mini Dragon system crossed my doorstep, a wardrobe malfunction precipitated a painful episode of reviewus interruptus. It was only in mid-May of 2019, after my date had made a round-trip back home for a change of undergarment, that I had the opportunity to get to know Master Mini Dragon and his consort—and leave behind this already overstretched dating metaphor.
In the beginning …
Dragoslav Colich has spent 40 years working with planarmagnetic technology. His inspiration came from hearing the Magnepan MG-II loudspeaker, whose imaging struck him as a thing apart from that of other loudspeakers. “I was blown away by how nice and pleasant it sounded,” he explained at the start of a lengthy phone interview. “So I took it apart, saw the simplicity of the technology, and got hooked.”
In the 1990s, after working in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) with planar-magnetic drivers, Colich continued that work in Canada, at Sonigistix, a company that made planar-magnetic transducers for multimedia. The structures whose diaphragms he helped perfect were small, 4" × 8" transducers with near-full-range capabilities—used, Colich says, in “very similar applications to the Mini Dragon system.”
