"And how are things in headphone land?" I hear you all asking, or not. Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.
There have been a couple of changes and a nice discovery. The removal of the Hegel HD12 from my system left me without a headphone option there and I was wondering what to do. Remembering that HFS'er George Hincapie had a couple of DAC/headphone units for sale I checked with him and was able to get his Cambridge Dacmagic Plus.
Mint condition, nice price, speedy delivery (to Holland!). Thanks George !
The Plus is a very different animal to its little brother, the Dacmagic 100. It has a pre-amp function, various filter options, a wider choice of input/outputs, twin Wolfson DAC chips AND a headphone amp. Looks neat, cool and expensive.
What I wanted to do first was just hook it up via the unused Toslink output from my CXC CD transport and run a pair of Grado SR225e's, this sounded really, really good and I was immediately forced to admit that the headphone section on the Hegel had not been all that wonderful. On further listening I began to suspect that the Dacmagic Plus would have given the Hegel a hard time all round (3x the price) - but it's gone now, would have been an interesting experiment.
I was so impressed by the authoritative detail and control of the Plus, using its own wall-wart PSU that I decided to plug it in to the SBooster linear power supply that the I had got for the 100. Then things went through the stratosphere. The combination of supercharged Dacmagic Plus with my Nighthawk headphones really pushed the MF X-CanV3 and Dacmagic 100 into the shadows. So much more grip and insight, relaxed but powerful.
The decision was made. The Plus stayed in the lounge with the SBooster and Nighthawks. The other gear is now the headphone option for the NVA system. one handy feature of both the CXC and DM100 is that they both switch off automatically if unused for an hour - as I regularly use this setup for 'snooze' music.
Verdict: the Cambridge Dacmagic Plus is a stunner (I believe Richer Sounds are discounting it at the moment). Straight out of the box it gives a cool, detailed performance with a load of options. Sound will rival far more expensive (oversampling) DACs, put a better PSU on it and it will really impress. And the headphone amp section is remarkably good.