Robert Harley of The Absolute Sound listened to a DragonFly Red on his desk for months before moving it into his reference system, where the little USB stick fed a pair of Magico speakers. He wrote that the Red, paired with AudioQuest's JitterBug, sounded "much, much better than it had any right to." The DragonFly is a digital-to-analog converter and headphone amplifier the size of a flash drive, and it plugs into a computer or phone in place of the built-in audio output. Its trick is to let the converter, not the computer, keep time, which cuts down jitter, the timing errors that Mark Fleischmann of Sound & Vision says "smear sound." AudioQuest's stated goal is "Do No Harm." The same thinking guides its cables, which use solid conductors and are tested so each one points the way that drains noise away. AudioQuest suits listeners who want better sound from the laptop or phone they own, and builders who treat power and cabling as part of the system.

Start with the DragonFly Red. Harley found the entry Black short of volume with his Audeze LCD-X headphones and expected most readers to choose the Red, calling it "worth double the price." The Red has nearly twice the output, so it is the one for harder-to-drive headphones. The step up is the Cobalt, with a newer DAC chip, and Alan Taffel of The Absolute Sound heard notes "stop smartly and exactly when they are meant to." Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ summed up the three as "good, better, bloody hell!" To use one with a phone you need Apple's Camera Adapter or an Android OTG adapter. Harley calls AudioQuest's JitterBug USB filter a "no-brainer" addition. For a full system, the Niagara 7000 power conditioner gives power amps high-current outlets and filters the source outlets more heavily. Roy Gregory of Hi-Fi+ advises keeping amps, analog sources and digital gear on separate banks and feeding the Niagara with the best power cord you can.

Bill Low began making custom cables in 1978 for his one-man hifi shop. He told StereoNET that cables were the only area of hifi where a customer could spend $20 and say "wow, that made a difference!" His first speaker cable was a finely stranded Litz design by Dave Gore, based on an idea Martin Colloms published in Hi-Fi News in 1977. Low founded AudioQuest in 1980 and showed at CES in Las Vegas in 1981. On long drives across the country he walked into stores that had never heard of him, set up a boom box and was comparing cables with the manager within 20 minutes. The AQ-404 moving-coil cartridge followed in 1982 and HyperLitz cables in 1988. The DragonFly arrived in 2012, and Harley credits it with creating an entirely new product category. The Niagara 7000 came in 2015, and by 2019 Gregory saw Niagaras chief among the power conditioners at hifi shows.