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

£9.9
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Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100 - Digital to Analogue Converter with Toslink, S/PDIF, and USB Inputs Featuring 24-bit Wolfson DAC - Silver

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

RRP: £99
Price: £9.9
£9.9 FREE Shipping

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Apart from anything else, we just loved the clean but always extended and tuneful bass this setting gave, with an utterly convincing sense of timing that made the most of the rhythmic qualities of any musical style. If your DacMagic 100 is operating in USB Audio Class 2.0 mode, set the output sample rate to 192,000Hz. Prices valid in stores (all including VAT) until close of business on 28th November 2023. (Some of these web prices are cheaper than in-store, so please mention that you've seen these offers online.)

There are two coaxial inputs and a single optical one, all switchable from the front. Add to this the USB input and gold-plated analogue RCA outputs for connecting to your hi-fi and the DacMagic 100 has every angle covered. Meanwhile, steep is superlatively detailed in simple music – single voice/instrument, or just a few – but slightly loses out to linear in very dense textures. As far as Bluetooth goes, the 200M is an altogether more qualified success – quite a bit of the alacrity, unity and positivity of its performance drops away a little. Everything’s relative though, of course, and the Cambridge Audio remains an engaging and enjoyable listen. And as a way of bringing some wireless connectivity to a system that has none, it could be a lot worse. Cambridge Audio DACMagic 200M review: design & usability As far as usability is concerned, it really couldn’t be any more straightforward. There’s no control app, no remote control… so just make your digital connection, hook the 200M to your amplifier or plug in your headphones, and that’s all there is to it. You’ll need to set a volume level, of course, and investigate your trio of filter options – but fundamentally the Cambridge Audio is a very straightforward device. The Cambridge’s three digital filters – Fast, Slow and Short Delay – offer fairly subtle differences, albeit some level of sonic customisation. We find ourselves settling for Short Delay – it seems the more punctual of the three in relation to timing – but it’s worth experimenting with them.The DacMagic 200M’s performance continues the momentum of the company’s recent hi-fi components, including the CX and Edge ranges. It’s recognisably ‘Cambridge’, characterised by a full, smooth tonality that’s complemented by an open, expressive and authoritative manner. 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. Minimum phase filters do without the pre-ringing, but do have some phase shift in the audio band. The actual frequency response is, to all intents and purposes, identical to that of the linear phase filter. The 'steep' option, meanwhile, is another linear phase filter, but with faster roll-off above 20kHz so that, effectively, no aliasing occurs.

The Cambridge Audio DacMagic 200M is a standalone multi input DAC, preamp and headphone amplifier. In 2021, this is a fairly commonly encountered specification and there are a number of products to choose from at or around this price point that offer it. Without the efforts of the 200M’s ancestors though, this might not have been the case. The DacMagic name has a great deal of provenance in this field. It first appeared when the world of digital audio looked very different to how it does now. Devised by software specialist Anagram Technologies of Switzerland and licensed – exclusively, to date – to Cambridge, this uses high-power digital signal processing technology to perform the digital filtering function.Fed a 16-bit/44.1kHz rip of Dusty Springfield’s Son Of A Preacher Man, the DacMagic 100 serves up an open, spacious sound. Vocals are given space to breathe and, even with a mix of instruments thrown in, everything knits together well. 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. There’s also a USB input that’s good up to 32bit – although it’s of the less common USB-B type. That's fine in terms of connecting to a laptop or other USB-ouputting source, but it's 2021 – we'd like to see an easy USB-C option too. The hardware that allows for this jump in decoding is a mix of new tech with established design practise. Like much of the rest of the Cambridge Audio range, the 200M is built around ESS decoding. In this case, the chipset used is the ES9028Q2M - a fairly impressive piece of silicone in its own right. In a design tradition from Cambridge Audio, the 200M uses two of them in a dual mono configuration. This allows for both a reduction in crosstalk and for the redundant channel in each DAC to run the differential of the decoded channel to sum for errors. Three user selectable filters are available to (very, very slightly) tweak the output. at 1kHz 0dBFS 24-bit signal with 22kHz low pass filter = 0.001% at 20khz 0dBFS 24-bit signal with 80kHz low pass filter = 0.003%



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