DacMagic side by side with the DacMagic Plus

[embleton]

The Cambridge DacMagic and DacMagic Plus are up-sampling digital to analogue converters (DAC's) that both amaze the ears when pushing digitally encoded music at them from optical/coaxial feed audio sources; such as those from TV's, computers or anything in between. Light at them analogue out to a Cambridge amplifier and then bi-wired to Tannoy DC6SE speakers is the setup in our system.

Let's face it most of us will be feeding these with lossy 320Kbps MP3 or 256 Kbps AAC audio encoded music tracks; as when you have a vast array of music it won't fit uncompressed even on a 5TB drive; with my own collection, it runs to 15,000 tracks at 320Kbps that takes up 280GB.

Once was the DacMagic that I thought was excellent with detail, the vocals portraying an almost three-dimensional soundstage floating around the room, but the DacMagic Plus just blows those thoughts right out the window, its imagery supersedes those by miles.

Vocals move easily through strides of mild vocal harmonic subtleties that amaze one's ears in comparison to an almost flatly heard vocal voices from the DacMagic. The sound from the DacMagic Plus is more layered with feelings of several rhythms running through the music concurrently, with harmony and precision, the music has an edge of total feeling and a lovely emotional flow.

Because the DacMagic Plus is so unforgiving of any imperfections in the mastering environment it's lovely to hear the flow of the vocals as they move forward and backward from the microphone, and as the artists move around the room as they record their tracks, layers of instruments and rhythmic movements, literally.

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon has you rocking in your chair purely attempting to keep up with the absolute amazing almost memorising layers and layers of sophistication that's been mastered into the original, that was once missing but is now revealed when listening to the difference between the DacMagic and DacMagic Plus. The DacMagic Plus is able to note the musical notes musically as they stop in mid-air and move up, right to the side and forward again in an almost endless second, boy it's not going to be everyone's taste, but I love it.