To ViciouS, your facts are way off with the Tidal/Dragonfly.
1. You don't stream with your Tidal account, you offline your playlists at full CD quality onto your phone and then play those songs "AT CD QUALITY" through the Dragonfly into the OEM stereo. Don't CDs sound way better to you than streamed music?
2. Yes it has a small amp in it, which essentially acts only as a preamp before the main amp in the OEM head unit. Now do you want to hear your music through an integrated chip from the OEM unit that only dedicates $5-10 to the DAC operation or one that dedicates almost all of the $100-200 you spend on a Dragonfly to the D to A conversion done by an ESS Sabre DAC.
3. Yes this is true with noise, but then why does anyone spend thousands on car stereos if they don't make a difference over road noise? This is not specific to the Dragonfly nor does it cover up all of its virtues.
4. Again, we are not streaming. And....if you offline some master quality tracks from Tidal, then you can get even higher resolution music such as 96/24 that the Dragonfly can readily decode. How else can you easily add that to your car stereo for a little over a hundred bucks.
5. My ears are just fine, they don't like distortion either, they know what it sounds like, and don't confuse it for better sounding music. Your discussion sounds mostly theoretical, and after 40 years of enjoying fine music myself, I care to base my opinions on what I hear or that of trusted audiophile resource. Distortion in actual usage in this case is not an issue at all. If you use a shielded AUX cable and set the iPhone about 4 bars below the top level, all works well. How can it make headphones and in home stereos sound great but yet do nothing for you car? Hummm
At any rate, each is entitled to their own opinion as has been expressed here. I just don't want someone to miss out on a chance to improve their system because of one person's pessimism and unsubstantiated comments. I doubt he has listened to a Dragonfly in his car or even at all, or maybe his ears are not as sensitive as mine or some of the rest of us. I have owned all four Dragonflys, the original, version 1.2, the black, and most recently the red. Each is a little better than the previous. I have sat in my Macan, the daily driver, and carefully compared all of these devices against each other and the stock iPhone. It is very clear to me through actual experience in Porsches and other vehicles that they sound much better than an iPhone alone. The other day I was driving to the track in my Cayman and noticed the music just didn't sound that good. In that moment I thought was the Macan's stereo that much better than the Cayman's? I had not remembered it that way before, and then I suddenly realized that I was on bluetooth. A few weeks later when returning to the track, I made sure that I grabbed the newly acquired Red out of the Macan and brought it with me in the Cayman.
Hey it is not going to make your system sound like a JL Audio/Focal/etc system, but its not going to cost many thousands of dollars either. You have almost nothing to lose. For $129 to $229, cost with adapter, you can inexpensively upgraded your car stereo. As ViciouS did concede, it also works great with headphones. You can plug it into your home stereo, the portable music player in the garage while we washed our cars today, or take it on the plane when you fly. It sounds light years better than bluetooth and you don't burn up your data on your phone account. To take full advantage of it though, you need a Tidal account with full CD quality or better music tracks. If you are using MP3s with only 256-320K resolution, it won't help nearly as much. CDs at 1,440K have 5.6 times the data available to retrieve more detail in your music. The Dragonflys do a far superior job of organizing those bits of data into beautiful analog music than any Porsche PCM or phone is able to. Try it, you might just like it. If unsure, make the purchase from a place like Crutchfield that gives you a 60 day return policy. Finally, I am in no way affiliated with Audioquest.
Here are a few thoughts from some professional reviewers:
AudioQuest's DragonFly Red puts high-end DAPs on notice | DAR__KO
AudioQuest DragonFly Black and DragonFly Red DACs | The Absolute Sound
https://www.whathifi.com/audioquest/dragonfly-red/review
Another two cents, but just went and listened to the Red versus bluetooth again. Really hard not to hear a substantial difference. The Red is obviously much more detailed and articulate, but it also opens up the soundstage and has much better imaging. The voices come out of the dash and float in space in front of you which sounds much more like a real person singing to you. Pianos, guitars, and drums sound more like the real thing as well. It also tightens up the flabby bass that plagues most car systems, especially from Bose.
