On the inside, business is taken care of by a pair of ESS Sabre ES9028Q2M digital-to-analogue converter chips. These make the 200M compatible with PCM digital audio files up to 32but/784kHz standard, as well as DSD512. With MQA compatibility on board too, there isn’t a digital audio file worthy of the name that the Cambridge Audio can’t handle. 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. It does deliver plenty of detail and agility, but we do miss out on a bit of power. Voices, meanwhile, are clean and natural but do veer towards the bright side when really pushed. 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.

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 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. There's an intimidating range of audio products available to us and whether its headphones, smartphones, speakers or even streaming services, they’re all promising you incredible sound. But there’s an undisputed way you can make your existing setup simply - better. By adding a DAC. 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 & usabilityYou may not haverealisedit, but you’ve used a DAC every time you have played music through your laptop or smartphone. These products have their own built-in but usually very poor quality DAC because it’s been designed to do one small part of a devices total functions on a budget. So if you’ve been investing in some nice speakers or headphones, you’re not going to be making the most of them unless you use a separate DAC which has been designed andoptimisedentirely for makinghi-fisound quality. The DacMagicPlus now internally upsamples any connected source to 24bit/384kHz and has improved jitter reduction. It can accept 24bit/192kHz audio via its USB input, too – a quality that's rare over USB for DACs. 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 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.

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. For those of you new to this concept, you’ll want to understand exactly what’s behind this sharpsounding acronym before you take our word for it so read on… If your DacMagic 100 is operating in USB Audio Class 2.0 mode, set the output sample rate to 192,000Hz. In the advanced tab you will be given the option to change the Windows output sample rate. If you are using your DacMagic 100 in USB Audio Class 1.0 mode, set this to ‘24-bit, 96000Hz’.

But you have to pay for it, and with impressive competition, the DacMagic Plus is in 'very good' (but not class-leading) territory. 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% 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. Power on the unit and select the input source that you wish to listen to using the source button located on the front panel. 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.

Standards of CD replay being what they are, it probably won't lift many modern players beyond recognition, but it could give a new lease of life to some older models and for computer-based music replay it is an excellent choice.

Conversor de audio Digital Analogico DAC WM8742. Un conversor de digital a analógico Wolfson de 24 bits, una entrada de audio USB 1.0 sin controlador de 24 bits/96 kHz y entradas digitales TosLink y S/PDIF permiten a DacMagic 100 recibir el detalle del sonido de tu equipo informático, iPod o televisor (entre otros dispositivos digitales) y mejorar su precisión, profundidad y claridad hasta obtener una experiencia de audio realmente excepcional. Catracteristicas Generales