Rab Boyce's Site

in my incessant quest to see just how much hi fi/av equipment one man can own...I purchased a DacMagic to act as a bridge between my macbook pro and my Graham Slee Novo headphone amp.

Initial impressions are somewhat mixed.

With high bit rate stuff ( 256K, 320 or losssless ) it sounds excellent. wonderfully open sound stage, tight bass and good sense of timing. The Novo is a good with percussion and vocals, as are my Grado SR60s..so it all seems to work well.

However, with anything less than that ( I still have 192 and below hanging around from when I started digitising music for low capacity Mp3 players ) then it sounds terrible...worse than the native output of the mac. It really sounds like the music is underwater...I'm guessing the gaps in the sound are just too much and the upsampling really messes up.

More investigation required...

My current settings are 41Khz 24bit out from the macbook pro over Toslink. ( USB option only supports 16 bit audio )

I haven't tried it with my Marantz 6003 as a CD transport yet..I'll guess that will be a better test of the quality of the DAC itself.

Update on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 9:21PM by Rab Boyce

ok...the DAC magic does work very well with the Marantz 6003 :) and the 192Kb stuff doesn't sound too bad. I must confess that was a mistake..the 'underwater' sound only seems to affect the 96kb stuff.

So would I recommend it...yes. I would.

Although, I wonder if my system is a little too clinical now....hmmm.