DACS

I have a DacMagicPlus what do you wish to know? It is £350 on richersounds now, I paid £250 over a year ago and narrowly missed out on getting it for £200.

Im not sure why they have increased the price so much.
 
I need to replace my Beresford Caiman MKII and those are the devices being considered. Keen to understand the performance of the DAC Magic Plus in particular given the twin Wolfson chips. I also need to replace my 25 year old Marantz CD63 and am considering the Cambridge CXC transport.
 
if you need the transport (~300alone), this and dacmagic+ together for ~500 at Richer does not sound so bad, or can you get a cheaper transport elsewhere ?

A Question - with the Dacmagic+ can you stream by wifi from a computer say, so the dacmagic+ appears like an playback device and you could either send a local media file or a streamed radio station say.
 
The CXC is the transport I want, it just can't be bettered for the money. It's really a question of which DAC to go for. The RS deal basically means the DMP is £174 and that's incredible for a competent DAC that has a dedicated chip per channel. The issue really is whether the relative performance of the MDAC or the Cambridge Azur 851D are significantly better to justify the cost difference.
 
I was perhaps going to ask why are you replacing the Marantz ?
( I recently replaced the transport in a meridian of a similar age and have a feeling this and Marantz both have cdmp 4/19 , I think it was) without updating other components (probably including my ears) I do not think the sound form a new dac will massively improve - that Marantz was quality.

[I would also like to stream digitally to amp however so may look for a dac]
 
I'm not convinced that the transport end will have experienced significant enough improvements in technology at this price range to justify chopping it in. The DAC would be worth upgrading due to streaming abilities and improvements in DAC chips IMO. I guess if you're very keen to have matching boxes and to freshen up the entire system then go for it. I don't think I'd be changing my CD player as a transport if I were to update the DAC or buy a Cyrus streaming integrated amp for example.
 
I have my DM+ hooked up to pc and optical out of tv for Netflix, I use the headphone amp to power audio technica 2000x headphones (very easy to drive) and I also use it as a preamp to my stereo. So its in constant use!

I have no idea about cd players as I dont use one but surely if you are bypassing the cd players dac and using a DM+ via optical in then I fail to see how a high end cd player would make much of a difference? Surely a say £150 cd deck with optical out would be all that is needed?

Anyway the DAC sounds great through my NAD3130 and Zensor 1s so no complaints here. I would be hard pushed to tell apart between the DAC and my turntable to be honest assuming levels are matched and the record is clean!
 
@seanyc5 where do you get you digital media ? (such that it sounds as good as a cd or approaches a turntable)
Unless I rip cd collection to flac I similarly still need a cd transport (Ok have a legacy collection too)
[ 320kb/s mp3 from Amazon does not really cut it, I am considering trying something like Tidal for flac, but the limited catalogs/subscription/non-ownership are 'annoying', so buying cd's is still economic ]

Have you used the dacmagic+ via wifi as well as wired ?


--

Other than multi bit rate streaming capability not sure that new dacs are that much better (you can pay £160 for a cd63 mkii still a lot of love vs DM+ cost)
if anything it is the mechanics of the cd transport that have improved, but they are becoming a minority product so cost more.

Personally not sure an LP has to be pristine clean, quality shines through even with a few clicks/noise.
Some 88/96 rips of lp sound good (having a dac as well as a2d is useful here)
 
Last edited:
I have my collection all ripped to FLAC and also use Google Music for finding new stuff, I will then usually get the LP if its available and not silly money.

Have you done any a/b/x testing with 320kbs vs Lossless? I have and its rather inconclusive! I honestly think most of it is in our heads, 320kbs mps3s can sound great so I wouldn't dismiss them.

Regarding vinyl, whilst its true that a lot of older records wipe the floor with the digital counterpart, most newer music is obviously recorded and mastered digitally with a few exceptions of course! Its just more involving playing a record, im more inclined to listen to the whole record. I personally am amazed how good vinyl can sound when you are essentially dragging a diamond needle over scratches in plastic!

Enjoy your music! :D
 
About transport quality, do not know anything personal about arcam although this article discussing the issue ironically suggested arcam had had problems using a PC DVD-ROM in un-named high end player [also see here, here ]
as article suggests transports have different error recovery with non-pristine discs , long term reliability too, noise levels (many pc drives noisy & ps3, whether that is because they spin faster eg >1x read/write speed)
Personally sony laptop blue-ray drive stopped working and have also replaced a philips mechanism in an old Meridian, so not immune to transport issues.

( If I was going to replace might consider a flexible htpc(nuc) solution with a dac plus cd/blu r/w drive to both listen to music and also reliably archive ripped flac media, photos etc. would also have to consider media compatibility since drives can be picky about cd-r/bd-r )
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom