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

Product Information

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. Notable: Astounding technical DAC performance regardless of price. Absolute polarity switch. Three easily-selected digital filters. Headphone output.

But you have to pay for it, and with impressive competition, the DacMagic Plus is in 'very good' (but not class-leading) territory. There's a choice of Linear Phase, Minimum Phase and Steep filter modes, which you should experiment with, too (we liked Minimum the best). THD versus level from -60 dBFS to 0 dBFS, unbalanced output at maximum variable gain, undithered 24-bit 44.1 ksps input, 22kHz bandwidth. ( R&S UPL.) This is worst-case USB: I fed a 7-way Belkin hub from my MacPro, and then ran a 6 foot crappy USB cable to the DacMagic Plus, for a total of about 12 feet of 10-year-old USB cable. That seems an obvious requirement, but it's surprising how often it's not quite met – one finds that the entrance of a male voice puts a female one slightly in the shade, or vice versa.This Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus is typical precise and lightweight Chinese: sheet metal case and aluminum front. 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. Move on to Emeli Sandé’s Heaven and the Cambridge paints a tonally even picture with well-mannered treble and weighty, precise low frequencies. A plastic base is included for it to stand vertically, say, on your desk. If you use this, the front-panel lettering doesn't rotate. As most commonly implemented, it has rather limited attenuation at exactly half the sampling frequency and, as a result, allows a little bit of aliasing distortion to occur if there is any audio above 20kHz. There is also pre-ringing on transients, though this has never been shown to be a real problem.

One tends to associate rhythm particularly with music for dancing or marching but, of course, it's no less important in a string quartet or ballad, just in a different way.

Connect the audio outputs of the DacMagic 100 using RCA cables to the line-input of your amplifier. It mutes the line outputs with a time-delay relay whenever headphones are inserted, a brilliant touch! As a result, we are treated to a version of the deluxe upsampling technology first seen in the 840C and 740C CD players from the Azur range. 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. Aha! The impedance of any driver changes with its acoustic loading, meaning headphones present different loads if on or off your head. When off-head, the ATH-M50 leads to more distortion with the Cambridge DacMagic Plus.