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

Product Information

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. 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.

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. Power on the unit and select the input source that you wish to listen to using the source button located on the front panel. 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. If you want to go wireless, there is an inevitable drop in quality – but the aptX dongle connected to our smartphones and laptop easily enough, and sounded better than standard Bluetooth connections.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 PC Linear phase is the type of filter most commonly used in up/oversampling players, since the very first Philips' machines in the early 1980s. It gives no phase shift at all within the audio band and rolls off very sharply around half the sampling frequency.

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.In some ways it’s most impressive as a desktop device, if for no other reason than it’s a colossal improvement on the sound of an unassisted MacBook Pro. Connected via USB-B and playing content (of various genres and file types) from the TIDAL desktop app, the gains in detail, heft, integration, focus, soundstage definition and plenty more besides, are obvious and significant via the Class A/B-powered headphone output. There are RCA and balanced XLR outputs, twin digital coaxial and optical inputs, and also digital coaxial and optical outputs. There have been concerns voiced that USB is intrinsically a more jittery interface than regular S/PDIF, so we tried our best to hear any differences between the various options. Frankly, we couldn't – certainly not consistently. Nor could we measure any, the DacMagic turning in measured results which in every way qualify it being as state of the art. 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.