Outboard DACs

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Outboard DACs
Cambridge Audio Dacmagic (£200)
Steve Harris & Paul Miller  |  Feb 05, 2009
There’s some controversy over who produced the first separate digital-to-analogue converter for CD users, but the honour is most convincingly claimed by Arcam, which launched its original Black Box back in 1989. By 1991, you could buy something smaller and cheaper, though as it came from California it had a grand-sounding name. The Audio Alchemy Digital Decoding Engine was the size of a small paperback, with a rudimentary plug-top power supply. In this country, Cambridge Audio wasn’t far behind, launching its original DacMagic in 1994.
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Outboard DACs
Bel Canto Dac3 (£1999)
David Berriman & Paul Miller  |  Jan 17, 2009
When I reviewed the CD-2 CD transport/player last year [HFN, April ’08], I liked its clean, smooth sound quality, especially when set to the internal DAC’s native 24-bit/192kHz rate. Although a CD player, it is principally intended as a transport (being built around a high-quality Pro2 CD mechanism). The DAC chip included, while good, is not a high-end device, yet Bel Canto managed to extract a very pleasing performance from it. I wondered what Bel Canto could do given a bigger budget for the processing and analogue circuits.
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Outboard DACs
Pro Ject Usb Box (£75)
Paul Miller  |  Jan 05, 2009
Just one of some 20 Pro-Ject ‘Box’ series components, this little number is essentially an outboard – and self-powered – USB soundcard. Priced at just £75 and built into Pro-Ject’s now-familiar wrap-around casework, the hardware also comes with some software on a mini CD. Dubbed ‘Direct Streaming Technology’ this is an installer for Foobar2000, a media player that, on PCs at least, avoids the default Windows Kernel mixer. The idea is to stream ripped CD media over USB at its native 44.
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