MODDED CAMBRIDGE DAC MAGIC
A Sonic Makeover For Digital Music Systems

To hear your laptop (or PC) music files deliver truly high end sound through your big rig requires a first rate stand-alone DAC-even a $500 sound card won’t quite get you there. The exceptional value choice for DACs under $1000 is the stock DacMagic ($429). It is, in effect, the DAC portion of the award-winning Cambridge 840C CD player ($1595) with an add-on USB input to connect to your computer (and, of course, coax digital inputs to seriously upgrade your current CDP). The DacMagic’s great sound is no accident, given its twin fully balanced 192k/24 bit upsampling WM8740 D/A chips and 32 bit DSP. Stereophile concurs: “In a word, it sounded glorious—far better than you have any right to expect for 400 bucks...I heard well-defined bass, exquisitely extended highs, and a natural midrange. The soundstage was admirably wide, and soloists and their instruments were precisely positioned. What more do you want? Well, you might ask for an even wider, deeper soundstage and more gut-wrenching bass. It’s possible that power-supply limitations kick in here...”

We couldn’t agree more about the limitations: indeed, our listening experiments uncovered several important DacMagic sonic bottlenecks, specifically in the power supply and vibration control areas. Our mods to clear-up those bottlenecks yielded astonishing improvements in the already excellent sonics of the DacMagic. They are:

• a much-improved AC power supply replacing the factory-supplied wall wart, complete with a 2” maple vibration-grounding base and a handsome, low dielectric absorption maple enclosure.

• Low Triplepoint footers integrated into the DacMagic chassis, greatly decreasing internal vibrations while tripling chassis mass.

• Clearview Helix AC power cord for the new power supply plus an Ultrathin Ribbon Umbilical connecting the new supply to the DAC.

• cryogenic treatment of all components and wiring.

With these key mods, the Modded DacMagic gains enormously in detail retrieval, smoother and more extended treble, deeper and much more articulate bass, lots of extra dynamic excitement and newfound rhythmic drive-well beyond the Benchmark, PS Audio, Bel Canto and Logitech DACs.