Cambridge Audio DacMagic -- $400, balanced.

[Hopstretch]

Silly name, but it certainly looks the part and the price is nice. Who's first?

Press fluff follows.

Cambridge Audio takes the market by storm with DacMagic upsampling digital to analogue converter

Suggested retail price -

[blessingx]

Hmmm, MagiDAC and now DacMagic. Very curious about this. Nice number of inputs.

[JBLoudG20]

This looks great. 24/192 upsampling, and $400. I'll add it to the list, should I end up rebuilding a full headphone rig.

[Hopstretch]

Here's the black version in "gamer" config.

[grawk]

interessant

[n_maher]

Nice!

That's almost within reach of the office rig and the small footprint is doubly good.

And of course the first thing you do is build a nice regulated power supply for it to replace the wallwart it comes with.

[blessingx]

Is it unusual to have digital outputs on a DAC? What is its purpose? To use with more than 2 channel devices?

[grawk]

Yup

But it means you can compare dacs pretty easily

[n_maher]

but nate, it says right there, use supplied power supply only!

I've got a piece of black tape that can fix that.

[tkam]

sounds pretty similar to the 840C, except for 192 instead of 384 upsampling.

It also uses completely different dacs than the 840c. The WM8740s vs the AD1955s.

[grawk]

yah, I could see it having monitoring purposes in a recording chain.

[grawk]

I'm more curious about the analog stage than the chip used as a dac.

[tkam]

Yeah I am too. It's price kinda rules out a discrete stage though.

[n_maher]

Yeah I am too. It's price kinda rules out a discrete stage though.

Yeah, but it could be argued that if you wanted the DAC out of the 840c you should just buy the 840c and get a free transport.

[grawk]

I don't know about you nate, but I'd rather have the dac from the 840c without the transport for $400 than the dac from the 840c for >$1000.

[n_maher]

Sure, that'd be nice. But we already know that isn't an option. You know they had to cut all sorts of corners (starting with the power supply) in order to hit a price tag as low as $400 (MSRP).

[JBLoudG20]

Sure, that'd be nice. But we already know that isn't an option. You know they had to cut all sorts of corners (starting with the power supply) in order to hit a price tag as low as $400 (MSRP).

DIY to the rescue!

[deepak]

I don't know if I could be any less interested in this

/awaits rave reviews from the audio press

[n_maher]

I don't know if I could be any less interested in this

/awaits rave reviews from the audio press

At least make your lack of enthusiasm funny.

[grawk]

he is practicing to be a grumpy crippled doctor, cut him some slack

[morphsci]

Mmmm Nice. DacMagic and Vince Vaughan Audio PSU. Sounds like a winner for the office rig.

[Cankin]

Holy, just add balanced cable to my HD650 and this is a $400 balanced rig

There will be one Pico FS in Oct.

[grawk]

don't bet on that being a good option, or an improvement over the pico.

[iceman94]

It's nice to see DACs in this form factor and price range, but I hope it actually pans out because if its being marketed as a computer DAC and has a stand for a "gamer" config, they might not pay attention to such trivial things as the analog output stage...

[n_maher]

Holy, just add balanced cable to my HD650 and this is a $400 balanced rig

There will be one Pico FS in Oct.

I'd want know the output impedance of the balanced stage before thinking about something like that. Just because you can connect two things doesn't mean it'll be any good.