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

Product Information

Whatever your music source, you'll enjoy genuine hi-fi quality sound by using the Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100. A Wolfson WM8742 24-bit DAC is teamed up with Cambridge Audio's wealth of digital engineering knowledge to create a sound that's vibrant, detailed and remarkably free from jitter. Jitter is especially prevalent on music sent via network devices or hard drives and can give the sound a harsh and unnatural quality. Move on to Emeli Sandé’s Heaven and the Cambridge paints a tonally even picture with well-mannered treble and weighty, precise low frequencies. 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. Within the utilities folder, open ‘Audio MIDI setup’. In here select the DacMagic 100, and you will be given the option to modify the output sample rate. 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.

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% 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. If your DacMagic 100 is operating in USB Audio Class 2.0 mode, set the output sample rate to 192,000Hz. In the 740/840 models it upsamples to 384kHz: here, a more modest version upsamples to 192kHz, but adds the flexibility of three filter types: 'linear phase', 'minimum phase' and 'steep'. The differences between these filters are in some ways subtle, but may be significant in determining the DAC's sound.Key to what made the DacMagic and DacMagic Plus so highly regarded when they hit the market was not so much that they used particularly cutting edge hardware, although they were far from shabby in this regard, but more that they implemented what they had exceptionally well. Beyond chasing the numbers, strong audio performance has always been about the circuit, the supporting components and the attention to detail putting it all together. The good news is that true 200M still delivers on this basic premise. The Cambridge Audio DacMagic is practical and good-looking too and we would rate it all-round as one of the best audio bargains we've come across in a while. 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 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.

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. The Cambridge Audio DacMagic 200M - for both good and less good reasons - feels very much like a continuation of one of the most longstanding names in affordable DACs. I’m writing this conclusion while it is playing Agnes Obel’s Aventine into the Edge A and Kudos C1. It’s by far the cheapest part of the system and it doesn’t feel remotely out of place. It sounds fluid, realistic and engaging delivering on a long-standing Cambridge Audio premise of the technology being the means to an end rather than the story in itself. It now handles every format you’d realistically want to throw at it with the same effortless and thoroughly enjoyable musicality. 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. With the DacMagic 100 connected, use your PC’s search function to locate ‘Sound Settings’. This will open a user interface such as below: To ensure that the DacMagic 100 is receiving Hi-Res audio, you may need to adjust some of the sound settings on your PC or Mac. To adjust the settings on PCThe 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.