Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100 - Digital to Analogue Converter with Toslink, S/PDIF, and USB Inputs Featuring 24-bit Wolfson DAC - Silver

Product Information

The Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus is an extremely high-performance DAC, with performance unsurpassed at any price. It also has the best jitter immunity I've ever measured, and this is from any of its inputs. It only has digital inputs so it's not really a preamp, but it does have four selectable inputs, a volume control and even a headphone output, so for many of us, it can be our master control center. All that said, we would probably live happily with any of them, but while the keen tweaker may want to experiment and perhaps adopt preferences based on musical style, we ended up listening mostly to linear. But you have to pay for it, and with impressive competition, the DacMagic Plus is in 'very good' (but not class-leading) territory.

Switch to the USB connection and Amy Winehouse's Valerie ('68 version) from the Lioness: Hidden Treasures album, there's not the weight or refinement we get from our reference Arcam rDAC. We started with some 24bit/192kHz files courtesy of our reference streamer via the coaxial input. R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion sounds detailed and fast. It's light on its feet and capable of impressive subtlety in both voices and instruments.Read the Users Manual to disable the volume control; as I recall it's done by holding one button while turning it on.

The DacMagic Plus is a lightweight piece of consumer equipment that is sonically superb, although the slowly-responding volume control and its plastic knob is a real disappointment.

to 96kHz PCM, DoP64 (Optical), 44.1kHz to 192kHz PCM, DoP64 (Coaxial), 44.1kHz to 768kHz PCM, Native DSD 64x to 512x, DoP 64x to 256x (USB) The 4 V RMS headphone output is more than enough for sensitive, low-impedance headphones like the Audio-Technica ATH-M50, and usually enough with less sensitive 600 Ω headphones like the DT880. We hook the Cambridge up to a Macbook Pro via USB type-B, feed it Arab Strap’s Fable Of The Urban Fox (16-bit/44.1kHz) and are instantly impressed by the articulacy of Aidan Moffat’s trademark poetic storytelling through the 200M. It not only communicates his unmistakable Scottish accent but also the masterful cadence of his delivery. Headphone response is rated 10 ~ 100,000 Hz, without a tolerance, but it's unclear how you get it a 100 kHz signal if the maximum sample rate is 192 ksps.

Here is is again from my Mac playing-out from iTunes, by USB this time, the worst possible interface: The Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus is an inexpensive, lightweight, Chinese-made DAC with astounding performance. They aren't very bright by day, and swell at night — except at night, you can't read the panel inscriptions.

Initial setup

Still flat even below 1 Hz. It's flat to within +0, -0.2 dB from infrasonics to the end of the music band, which is great. That 0.2 dB at 20 kHz is probably from cable capacitance and the 50 Ω output source impedance of the DacMagic Plus. It mutes the line outputs with a time-delay relay whenever headphones are inserted, a brilliant touch! Aha! The 50 Ωoutput source impedance leads to the added low-frequency distortion. At 0.02%, forget about it. There's a choice of Linear Phase, Minimum Phase and Steep filter modes, which you should experiment with, too (we liked Minimum the best). That smoothness clings to the violins leading Ólafur Arnalds’ Spiral (Sunrise Session) (24-bit/96kHz) in a way that makes it enjoyable without clouding the textural finesse or dynamic undulation of the strings that communicate the piece’s beautiful fragility. The Cambridge rides the dynamic ebbs and flows nicely, showing its grace in the quieter moments and its authority in the louder ones.

The biggest disappointment about the high-performance DacMagic Plus is its poky volume control. You have to keep turning and turning it to change the volume. Connect the audio outputs of the DacMagic 100 using RCA cables to the line-input of your amplifier. Conversor de digital a analógico con entradas digitales S/PDIF y TosLink, y una entrada de audio USB (todas compatibles con 24 bits) The whole right-hand side of the Cambridge’s facade is dedicated to displaying the sampling rate of the audio signal being fed into it. Several LEDs each labelled with a sampling rate –‘44.1kHz’, ‘48kHz’, ‘96kHz’ and ‘192kHz’, for example – light up to signify it. So if you’re playing a CD-quality file, the ‘44.1kHz’ LED will illuminate. Likewise, LEDs for MQA and DSD light up when those types of files or streams are detected.Power: 12V wall-wart. 100-240V, 50-60 Hz, with three different power connectors for world-wide use. Its headphone amplifier performance is typical, limited by its 50 Ω output source impedance, but at least it's 12 dB louder (4 V RMS max.) with high-impedance headphones than most iPods and portable equipment.