The Sixth DragonFly Is Here, Built From 28 Parts Instead of 107

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Sep 7, 2026· updated Sep 8, 2026

The Sixth DragonFly Is Here, Built From 28 Parts Instead of 107

The sixth DragonFly is here. AudioQuest showed the DragonFly Copper at HIGH END Vienna in June 2026 with worldwide shipping quoted for September, and the little copper-plated stick is now reaching buyers. What arrived alongside it is more interesting than a spec sheet: on 3 September 2026, Stereophile's Tom Fine published a design account from Gordon Rankin, the engineer who has drawn every DragonFly since the first one, explaining why the new circuit board carries 28 components where the 2012 original carried 107.

That is roughly a quarter of the parts count. Rankin describes the result as functionally identical to what came before, though sonically very different — his phrasing, and worth holding onto, because a 74% reduction in parts is the kind of number that usually signals cost-cutting rather than a rethink. His stated reasons are neither.

Reason one: the capacitors stopped existing

Rankin told Stereophile that Ukraine supplies more than 80% of the world's acrylic, a material used in film capacitors, and that as a consequence the film capacitors used in previous DragonFly versions were simply no longer available to him. That figure is his account of his own supply situation rather than an independently verified market statistic, and it is worth treating as such — but the practical upshot for the product is concrete. A designer who cannot buy the part he specified last time has to redraw the circuit around parts he can buy.

This is the unglamorous reality behind a lot of current audio engineering. Component availability, not ambition, sets the boundaries of what a board can contain. The DragonFly Copper is an unusually legible example because the designer said so out loud.

Reason two: MQA no longer needed a seat at the table

The second reason Rankin gives is the collapse of MQA, the hi-res delivery format that earlier DragonFlys rendered on-board. With MQA processing out of the picture, that portion of the design could go. Rankin's argument is about power rather than politics: MQA required a lot of power, he says, and "More power equals more noise."

Removing a processing requirement removes the silicon that served it, the parts that supported that silicon, and the noise penalty of feeding it. In a device the size of a USB stick, where every milliamp is drawn through the host's port and every switching artefact has nowhere far to go, that compounding matters more than it would in a mains-powered box.

What is actually inside

The Copper is built around a new 32-bit ESS Sabre DAC and headphone-amplifier chip that, per Stereophile, delivers twice the output power of the 2019 DragonFly Cobalt. Driving it is a new Microchip Technology microprocessor that cuts current draw by 25% and needs fewer supporting components than its predecessor — the two silicon changes together account for a good deal of the shrunken parts list.

Externally, the case is high-conductivity copper-plated, which AudioQuest says improves shielding against RF noise. The unit plugs into USB-A and requires no driver installation on Windows, Apple or Linux machines. For phones and tablets it ships with AudioQuest's DragonTail adapter, USB-A female to USB-C male. Stereophile gives the price as $250 in the US.

The line so far

AudioQuest's Stephen Mejias laid out the model history for Stereophile: the original DragonFly in 2012 (v1.0), then v1.2, then the Black and Red pair in 2016 — new DAC chips, MQA rendering, and the first support for portable devices — followed by the Cobalt in 2019 and now the Copper. AudioQuest states on its website that more than 300,000 DragonFlys have sold globally since 2012.

Still 24-bit/96kHz, and Rankin has an argument for that

The Copper's resolution ceiling remains 24-bit/96kHz, unchanged across a line that now spans fourteen years. Rankin defends the decision directly. "I am a minimalist designer at heart," he told Stereophile, and "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."

His technical case, and it should be read as his opinion rather than settled fact, is that chipmakers including ESS and AKM run their own testing at 48kHz rather than at the 384kHz or 768kHz figures printed on their datasheets, because performance degrades as rates climb — core temperature rises, effective bits are lost, noise goes up. Whether other engineers agree is a separate and long-running argument; what matters for reading this product is that the sample-rate ceiling is a stated design position, not an oversight.

Why Rankin's name keeps appearing

Rankin runs Wavelength Audio and is widely credited as the first person to apply asynchronous USB to audio — the technique that let computers become plausible digital sources rather than jittery afterthoughts. He has designed for Ayre, MBL and Berkeley, and has licensed his Streamlength USB technology to other manufacturers. He also tells Stereophile the origin story of the format itself: pitching the idea of a DAC in a USB-stick body to AudioQuest founder Bill Low at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, around 2011.

Fifteen years on, the dongle DAC category is crowded in a way it wasn't then, and the DragonFly's own lineage has passed through two DAC-chip generations, one format that has since collapsed, and now a supply crisis in a material most listeners have never thought about. Into The HiFi has not heard the Copper, and we are not going to tell you how it sounds or how it compares with the Cobalt. But the account Rankin gave Stereophile is a rare piece of engineering candour: a product whose most quotable number — 28 parts, down from 107 — turns out to be a story about what a designer could no longer buy, and what he no longer had to build.

Full details, including all quoted material, are in Tom Fine's piece for Stereophile. The Vienna launch and September shipping window were reported by ecoustics and StereoNET.

Frequently asked questions

What is the AudioQuest DragonFly Copper and how much does it cost?

The DragonFly Copper is the sixth generation of AudioQuest's USB stick-format DAC and headphone amplifier. It was shown at HIGH END Vienna in June 2026 and shipping was quoted for September 2026. Stereophile gives the US price as $250. It plugs into USB-A and needs no driver on Windows, Apple or Linux.

How many parts does the DragonFly Copper use compared with the original DragonFly?

Designer Gordon Rankin told Stereophile that the DragonFly Copper is streamlined to 28 parts, against 107 in the 2012 original DragonFly. Rankin describes the two designs as functionally identical, though sonically very different. That is roughly a quarter of the first generation's component count.

Why did Gordon Rankin redesign the DragonFly with fewer components?

Gordon Rankin gave Stereophile two reasons. First, he says the film capacitors used in earlier DragonFly versions were no longer available, citing acrylic supply from Ukraine. Second, the collapse of MQA meant AudioQuest no longer needed MQA processing on board — which, Rankin says, required a lot of power, and more power equals more noise.

What DAC chip is in the AudioQuest DragonFly Copper?

The DragonFly Copper uses a new 32-bit ESS Sabre combined DAC and headphone-amplifier chip which, per Stereophile, delivers twice the output power of the 2019 DragonFly Cobalt. A new Microchip Technology microprocessor cuts current draw by 25% and requires fewer associated components than the previous generation.

What maximum resolution does the DragonFly Copper support?

The DragonFly Copper's resolution ceiling remains 24-bit/96kHz. Designer Gordon Rankin defends this to Stereophile as a deliberate minimalist choice, arguing that chip performance degrades at very high sample rates as core temperature rises, costing effective bits and adding noise. That reasoning is Rankin's stated opinion rather than an established finding.