Just wanted to mention what we thought about the DACmagic at the Colorado head-fi mini-meet, but briefly - we'll get into it more in a meets and impressions thread soon. This was with myself, Blutarsky and Luminette after everyone else was packing it up (I don't think Sherwood was still around).
We compared it to the Apogee mini-DAC with sigma 11 PSU and Stello DA100. We used optical input at 16/44.1 and 24/96 with a Linn master recording, and XLR out with ALO SXC XLR cables (and silver RCA IC). We all thought it sounded very good and it's frequency response, tone and soundstage were very good. But (yeah, you knew that was coming), it was a little soft around the edges and slightly slow on the attacks, and there was not quite as much micro-detail as the Apogee and Stello. We were starting to get burned out by the time we finished listened to these three DAC at the end of the meet, but nevertheless we could hear the differences before everything started to sound the same 30 minutes later (forcing us to rest out ears for a while).
It is worth $400 for all it's features, and we did try all three filters, with the one on top having the best attack, but we did not get to spend a lot of time getting familiar with the three filters and different genre and material. The same $400 gets a Headroom Micro DAC that has less features and similar sound (from memory - we didn't have it on hand). Based on what we heard, the Cambridge DACmagic sounds closer to the Apogee and Stello DA100 than it does to my CD5001 analog output, although my CD5001 analog out is also pretty good to start with.
The Apogee with sigma 11 PSU was a little sharper or more well defined than the Stello, but the Stello was very relaxing without feeling like it was losing or missing anything. I thought both were within a few percentage points of each other and only slightly preferred the Apogee - I'd be happy with either Stello if I didn't already have the Apogee. I'd be happy with the Cambridge if I hadn't heard better.
