Cambridge Audio DACmagic Plus

[Electone]

Purchased one of these this past week and I've had an opportunity to put it through its paces. Got it for half price - factory refurb unit with full warranty. Nicely built with easy to understand controls. I like that the indicator shows what sampling rate it's processing and everything is upsampled. I'm feeding it via a Chromecast Audio - streaming from my hard drive server. A mix of FLAC, mp3 and some hi-rez files. It sounds better than the CCA's built-in DAC and that was what I was hoping for. There are three digital filters you can play with: Linear, Minimum & Steep. I don't hear much or any difference between them, except that I seem to like Minimum the least.

One negative is the built-in headphone amp. It is rather anemic sounding through my Sennheiser HD598 cans. The headphone amp in my Yamaha C4 pre-amp absolutely blows it away. But other than that, this is a fine sounding DAC. Highly recommended.

 

[SoNic67]

Congrats, that's a nice DAC, good upsampling implementation via a true DSP. The WM8740 is a decent 64 level delta-sigma design (6 bit d-s). I am puzzled why the HD598 sound anemic, at 50 ohms shouldn't be that hard to drive.
I noticed that using CCA with Google Play Music, everything got re-sampled to 48kHz. And the playback was not gapeless (Pink Floyd albums where absolutely horrendous chopped). I tried Hi-Fi Cast and that brought back the bitperfect playback and the gapeless mode.

 

[KevinJS]

Purchased one of these this past week and I've had an opportunity to put it through its paces. Got it for half price - factory refurb unit with full warranty. Nicely built with easy to understand controls. I like that the indicator shows what sampling rate it's processing and everything is upsampled. I'm feeding it via a Chromecast Audio - streaming from my hard drive server. A mix of FLAC, mp3 and some hi-rez files. It sounds better than the CCA's built-in DAC and that was what I was hoping for. There are three digital filters you can play with: Linear, Minimum & Steep. I don't hear much or any difference between them, except that I seem to like Minimum the least.

One negative is the built-in headphone amp. It is rather anemic sounding through my Sennheiser HD598 cans. The headphone amp in my Yamaha C4 pre-amp absolutely blows it away. But other than that, this is a fine sounding DAC. Highly recommended.

Good choice. I use mine as a digital preamp, feeding all of my digital sources to it, leaving my main preamp to handle my analogue sources. I gave up playing with the filters. Like you, I found that they don't seem to do a lot.

 

[Electone]

I noticed that using CCA with Google Play Music, everything got re-sampled to 48kHz. And the playback was not gapeless (Pink Floyd albums where absolutely horrendous chopped). I tried Hi-Fi Cast and that brought back the bitperfect playback and the gapeless mode.

Yes, I noticed that with Google Music as well. I don't use it for any kind of critical listening, just for background tunes, so it's not that much of an issue for me.

 

[ldatlof]

I had the original dacmagic and the only filter I could hear a difference on was steep. Good dac that I bought used and which I sold for what i paid for it. Enjoy it!

 

[AlTinkster92]

Been thinking about a new DAC myself, will check into one of these. Presently still using my 1st DAC that's 3 plus years old, a AUNE T-1 tube DAC.

 

[BayouTiger]

Does the plus use a different DAC than the 100? Always wondered if it was better, or just a 100 with a much bigger feature set.

 

[ferninando]

I had the original dacmagic and the only filter I could hear a difference on was steep. Good dac that I bought used and which I sold for what i paid for it. Enjoy it!

I too have the orig. DacMagic and it really did a huge improvement to my music listening.
Dual Wolfson DACs really did the trik. great sound qual. improvement.
Highly recommend the DACMagic orig. or later models. Be sure it has dual DACs of top quality if they've changed from Wolfson.