Hi! Hopefully someone has run into this situation before. I recently bought a Dragonfly to use as a DAC in my car, but I can’t get it to work. I’m trying to figure out why it is not working.
Here are the connection components:
Dragonfly Cobalt
Apple lightning to USB camera adapter
Anker 3.5 mm audio cable
Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter
iPhone 11 Pro Max (also tried with an iPad)
Car: 2023 Toyota Venza. Venza has one USB-C audio port (plus 2 usb-c additional charging only ports)
My first thought was that one of the adapters might be faulty, but they work for other uses.
Also, the Dragonfly works fine in a slightly different set up, outputting to a small speaker rather than the car (and requiring a couple adapters less).
Super guesswork on my part here, but in my vehicle the USB port is designed to accept digital signals, not analog. By using the Dragonfly, you are presenting an analog signal to the port ? My vehicle has a 3.5mm audio in jack for use with a DAC, does the Venza have one of those?
I’m not seeing the point of the project. The cars dac is the one doing the final dig to audio, not the dragonfly. And most all car dacs are setup to do so at a lower shared resolution so it can mix the audio sources including navigation and warning messages.
You need a car with an aux in to really use the dragonfly, and even then many aux inputs are adc’d back to digital so the car can mix the audio inputs.
Thank you all for the super quick replies. Unfortunately, the car does not have a 3.5mm audio in jack… sounds like trying to add an external DAC might be pointless then?
I guess that depends, not only on the quality you are looking for, but also the sound system in the car. I did not use a DAC on my previous car, but this one seemed like it could benefit from a decent DAC.
You can use a DAC if your car has an auxiliary input jack, but that does not utilize CarPlay. I tried it but it was not worth the hassle vs USB into CarPlay. If you really want it, it should not cost a lot to have an audio shop add the input.
Not if you are adding a superfluous ADC/DAC step which all the Dragonfly and ADC adapter is going to do.
Digital goes out to Dragonfly which then outputs analog which then has to be turned back into digital (ADC) and fed into your car stereo which will use it’s DAC to redo the final Digital to Audio step.
Potential Issues
Every DAC/ADC/DAC step has a chance to lower quality of signal due to hardware quality
The ADC step is going to be performed by some cheap device with probably horrible specs
This is a DAC, just like the dragonfly. But, it is not an ADC, so it cannot accept incoming analog signals, nor turn them into digital. For you to do what you want in this setup you would need an ADC after the Dragonfly, like this one, I think, no guarantee on how well it will work. Let us know if you try it as it is cheap enough. Adapter You would plug the output of the Dragonfly into the microphone port of the adaptor.
