In Reply to: Note on DacMagic posted by LWR on November 9, 2014 at 06:36:42:
The DacMagic/Plus sound is very dominated by the Wolfson WM8740 DACs. These DACs do the I-V conversion onboard and there isn't a whole lot in the output stage to make a night and day difference with the basic design. Other products that have current output DAC ICs on board can sound radically different depending on the designers preference. I bought one of each of the DacMagic models for a project and I went to town on the DacMagic, re-capping the power supply, and all critical bypass/decoupling caps etc, replacing the 5532 and OP275 for LME49722, replacing the metal film polypropylene caps for matched polystyrene caps, replaced the output NP caps for Nichicon MUSE ES and the difference hardly justified the effort and expense! Doing similar on a Musical Fidelity X-DACv3 (as well as grafting in a Tentlabs XO clock module) transformed it from sounding "OK" to something outstanding!
Looked at another way, the Cambridge Audio design is actually very good engineering - they have achieved close to the best performance for the price point chosen. More exotic components aren't necessary. To improve the sound they choose to go to a current output DAC AD1955 as in the 851 DAC and CD player for the reasons I outlined.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
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Follow Ups
- RE: Note on DacMagic - flood2 16:35:23 11/15/14 (0)