CAMBRIDGE AUDIO DacMagic 200M DAC/preamp
Not many DACs can claim to be celebrating a silver anniversary, but Cambridge Audio’s DacMagic 200M maintains the magic of the company’s 1996 original, and then some.
Not many DACs can claim a silver anniversary, but Cambridge Audio’s DacMagic 200M maintains the magic of the 1996 original, and then some.
There’s a long history to Cambridge Audio’s DacMagic. The first of its line arrived back in the mid-1990s when ‘off-board’ DACs, as they were called, were still a new notion, the idea being to upgrade the CD players that were becoming increasingly popular.
This was forward thinking by James Johnson-Flint and Julian Richer, who had only recently revived Cambridge Audio by harnessing some of the UK’s top hi-fi designers — Mike Creek was behind their first new product, the outstanding A1 budget amplifier in 1995, followed in 1996 by that original DacMagic. This was a design by John Westlake, who had started his days with legendary turntable company Pink Triangle, designing its surprising DaCapo DAC in 1991. Westlake was involved with the first three DacMagic designs, as well as being hands-on in getting Cambridge’s China manufacturing facilities up to scratch, before later going on to design DACs, amplifiers and other electronics for Peachtree Audio, Audiolab (under IAG) and, more recently, Pro-Ject.
So this is a product with a respected lineage of high performance; that first DacMagic back in 1996 netted Cambridge its first What Hi-Fi? Award, and its descendants have maintained momentum: the miniature DacMagic XS USB DAC took our own Sound+Image Award in 2015. Can the new model maintain Cambridge’s record for achieving heights of performance significantly beyond asking price?
Equipment
The new DacMagic 200M is a compact unit at 21.5cm wide, so half standard hi-fi width, matching for size recent products like the Alva Duo phono preamp, while its design and ‘Lunar Grey’ finish follow the lines established by the AX and CX ranges, indeed right up to the no-holds-barred Edge amplifiers which so impressed us in 2019.
Here the front panel has just three press buttons — for power, source select and filter, though these are also re-used in combination to access various ‘hidden’ menu functions, for example switching the normally fixed outputs to become variable, under control of the volume knob. That turns the DacMagic 200M into a useful digital preamp which could directly drive power amps or active speakers, especially with the balanced XLR output to the rear. We used it in this way to great effect with ELAC’s Navis speakers (see review last issue), the balanced inputs of which are their path to greatest purity.
Otherwise when used just as a DAC the DacMagic’s well-damped volume control will adjust only the full-size headphone output, which is positioned on the right of the front fascia. That’s driven by Class-AB amplification which, thanks to a reduction in output impedance, promises more power and less distortion than the output in the previous DacMagic design.
Those who like to be well informed will appreciate the two rows of small LEDs which illuminate to indicate the signal being received. These will immediately impress DAC addicts by including lights for sampling frequencies right up to 705.6 and 768kHz PCM, and for DSD from 64× right up to 512×. That’s enough to handle not only all of today’s high-res files and streams but those for the foreseeable future. (To test those highest PCM rates, we downloaded special test files made by Stephen Dawson, which can be found via tinyurl.com/SI340SD.)
All these LEDs and labels make for a slightly busy aesthetic on the front panel, but fairly subtly so, and we suspect audio fans will take information over obscurity any day. Indeed we’d add one more, a light to distinguish between 16-bit and
24-bit, given the increasing availability of 24-bit/44.1kHz files from streaming services such as Qobuz.
Round the back a full third of its width is dedicated to the outputs, thanks to the inclusion of large balanced XLR analogue outputs, which are a pointer to the aspirations of Cambridge with this unit. If you have an amp with balanced inputs, you can enjoy the higher signal level and lower noise available from these, especially over longer distances — in preamp mode you could run them to power amps alongside your speakers. And in addition to XLR, of course, there’s a pair of standard RCA unbalanced analogue sockets.
There are four digital inputs, with the first two offering the choice of optical or coaxial connection. The optical inputs are limited to 24-bit/96kHz, the coaxials to 24-bit/192kHz. This is just hardware limitation; 96k is the theoretical limit of Toslink, which was designed for 48k. Some DAC designers choose to push it to 192k, but reliability can become an issue. Indeed Cambridge’s manual implies they haven’t put a hard restriction, saying only that “some optical cables may not work correctly at 192kHz”, it says.
The USB-B connection for computer is the input which allows the leap to higher PCM and DSD rates. This also supports MQA, so enabling playback of MQA-encoded files and the streaming of Masters files from the higher level of Tidal replay. An ‘MQA’ LED on the front panel will glow blue to indicate it is playing an MQA Studio file, which has supposedly been either approved by the artist/producer or verified by the copyright owner, or will glow magenta to indicate that the unit is merely rendering an MQA stream or file to its maximum resolution. (The latter function — to compress files for easier streaming — is rapidly becoming redundant now that most people enjoy bandwidth more than sufficient for uncompressed high-res FLAC streaming, as delivered by Qobuz, Deezer
HD and others.)
Finally there’s Bluetooth available, for which a small external antenna screws into the back. In terms of codecs this Bluetooth provision caters better to Android devices than Apple ones, since there is the aptX codec available, which many Android phones can use to achieve slightly lossy CD-quality performance, but no AAC, which raises Apple devices above the base-level SBC codec. Nicely, though, and unusually, you get confirmation of aptX flow from the input light on the front panel, which will be solid on for SBC but which briefly darken every few seconds when receiving aptX.
Performance
We note that the twin DAC chips within the DacMagic 200M are the ESS ES9028Q2M SABRE32 Reference DAC, a popular choice, though listed by ESS as mobile-friendly chips, with low energy consumption. They’re also specified as limited to 32-bit 384kHz. So the first thing we did was plug our MacBook Pro into the USB-B input and head to our Mac’s Audio-MIDI settings to see what it offered. Sure enough (see left), we could address it at up to 768kHz. Selecting that max, we played our 768kHz test file and it played fine, with the 768kHz light illuminating on the DacMagic. Ditto the 705.6kHz test file. We had to set these manually in the Mac’s settings; a Mac alone delivers a fixed output frequency and won’t follow a file’s native rate. Roon does, but as yet supports only 384kHz, for the reasonable reason that almost nothing has been released beyond that. But the input abilities were certainly confirmed.
We then reverted to less esoteric file types to enjoy our full range of available music, with one of the first tunes up being the gentle live version of Kid from the Pretenders’ ‘Isle of View’ set, for which the DacMagic delivered what emerged as the unit’s defining characteristic — not a particular trait, but an overall heart-lifting clarity. The acoustic guitar plucking was cleanly edged, the strings resiny and rich, Hynde’s vocal yearningly sweet, the overall mix perhaps just a little peaky at high volume, but as a whole holding us rapt. Full points for letting the musical soul through.
This held across genres from raging to classical. We pumped it with Future Cut’s magnificent production for Tom Jones 2008 album ‘24 Hours’; there’s plenty going on during the track In Style and Rhythm but the Cambridge cleanly separated it all with top timing and serious soundstage depth, delivering Sir Tom on form from the flange-laden opening to the brass-stabbing close.
An even more dense challenge is Holst’s Jupiter (von Karajan, 1981), but the DacMagic again kept everything in place while rolling out emotion behind the sonics, especially in the slower section that Holst recycled for I Vow To Thee, My Country. (Warning to Brits: tears may roll.)
We experimented with the Cambridge’s three digital filters — Fast, Slow and Short Delay — which match the three built-in options that come with the ESS chips, where the last option is instead called a minimum phase option. As usual the changes are very subtle; there is at least a light click as you select between them, so indicating that something is actually happening… Cambridge doesn’t have much to say on the subject either: when describing the filter button in the manual it says “see later section for details”, but then doesn’t bother. If you have a wildly resolving system, it’s room for some experimentation.
For headphone listening we switched to the Qobuz Mac desktop app, which usefully takes control of the Mac’s output rate. With a nice pair of open Sennheisers plugged into the DacMagic’s headphone amp we were able to enjoy entirely smooth and congestion-free replay up to the highest levels of replay — as far as we were prepared to take our ears anyway, and that’s louder than most. It’s a slightly safe headphone sound, revealing but never overly edgy, smooth rather than brash, so that Robert Plant’s vocal on Led Zeppelin’s The Rover (at 96kHz) was held in check but still clear and solid over the also central drums and bass, while Jimmy’s main track guitar chugs to the right and his overdubs to the left — one of the best portrayals of the often-difficult Zep remastered digital files we’ve enjoyed.
Tyler, The Creator’s EARFQUAKE showed that there’s plenty of power in the headphone output to drive high bass content where it’s on the recording, and here without it overly masking the stuff happening higher up. If we’ve heard things a bit more sparkling up top, it’s a fatigue-free balance that keeps you listening over long sessions. And its powers of separation and grace under pressure were confirmed by its avoidance of the tendency of lesser equipment to flatten kd lang’s layered vocals on the crescendos of The Air That I Breathe; here it felt more like the headphone amp was just hitting its stride, and we were encouraged to turn it a notch still further up.
We still haven’t warmed to Cambridge’s new power switches; we can’t tell when they’re on or off, especially in daylight — the light just becomes brighter when it’s on. At least here there’ll be an input indicator also lit when it’s on, so we learned how to interpret the combination. But we’d still prefer the light simply to be off when the unit is off.
When we were using the DacMagic 200M as a preamp for the ELAC Navis active speakers, we had hoped to plug our TV’s optical output into the DacMagic to play through the ELAC speakers — but the signal suffered regular and constant interruptions, as if the sync was dropping. We played with the settings of the TV, a current model Samsung, with no luck fixing the problem. This is by no means an isolated occurrence, and other companies have confirmed to us that TV optical outputs can be wayward enough in their digital delivery to cause such issues. And in the DacMagic 200M manual we came across a warning in this regard: “NonHi-Fi products such as TV’s and set-top boxes may experience interruptions, glitches or momentary dropouts during use. This is due to an inconsistent sample rate being produced by the TV, that the DAC inside DacMagic 200M is unable to process, thus creating disruptions to the signal.”
So you have been warned. We later tried an older Toshiba TV, and it worked fine. So if TV replay is to be a key part of your proposed use for this DAC, we’d suggest you attempt a trial before final purchase.
Conclusion
The DacMagic 200M is versatile on inputs, excellent in offering a balanced output as well as unbalanced, and with useful feedback on the stratospheric conversion rates available via its USB-B input. But of course it’s the sound quality which puts it up with the very best at this price, whether listening to attached headphones or playing from its analogue outputs. We were not surprised by this, given the company’s history in this regard, but we were nevertheless thrilled by the performance of this well-armed, high-performing all-rounder.
“switching the normally fixed outputs to become variable turns the DacMagic 200M into a useful digital preamp, under control of the volume knob...”