Hello All

I have recently purchased a DAC by Cambridge Audio

http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/assets/documents/DAC_Magic_rear.jpg

I was quite unhappy with the sound of some of my digital music libray, even some of it being at high bit rates or 320 or lossless.

My digital library is on a mac mini. I also have beoport, beocentre 2 socket box and beolab 9 speakers.

The set up is as follows:

USB from MacMini to BeoPort

USB from MacMini to DAC

1/4 inch headphone jack from DAC to BeoPort

Essentially the DAC is used as an external sound card whilst retaining the functionality of the BeoPort.

The improvement in the quality of the sound is quite marked.. I'm hearing sounds on digital tracks (mostly mp3's) that i haven't heard before. 

I have a few questions for those who may be in the know:

1. Have I set the connects up correctly? Is there a better way to connect everything?

2. I have noticed a vast improvement in sound quality, however on many tracks i know hear an occassional crackle which is quite annoying. Im using a fairly cheap cable to connect......... Im wondering whether:

a. The issue is with cabling

b. Something to do with when ive ripped cd's to my MAC (ie dust on the track..havent worked out if the crackles appear in the same place constantly yet)

3. Netradio now cannot really be used with the DAC connected as the crackles and pops is dreadful- i assume this is poor phone line problem? Have tried a headphone jack splitter in the beoport so that dac can be easily turned on and off using the computer. However using the splitter jack (probably a cheap one) degrades the sound quality considerably. Would buying a good splitter solve the problem?

Any advice really appreciated (picture of rear of DAC below).

I hope I've made some sense

Best Wishes

David Coyne

Sydney, Australia

Hello,

Congrats on purchasing the DACMagic, it's of great quality and price too. I have the following setup:

MacMini ---> USB ---> DacMagic ---> RCA converted to DIN5p ---> Beocenter 9500. This works just fine.

I was just wondering with your setup that is it so that both DacMagic and Beoport are connected to MacMini via separate connection and not daisy-chained like my setup and also the Beoport is connected to DacMagic with 1/4 headphone jack again? I am not familiar with Beoport but maybe someone who is can say which way is correct?

You said you took the 1/4 headphone jack connection from DacMagic to Beoport? Did you mean the RCA output converted to some other connection via adaptor which then goes out to Beoport. I don't know if you did so, but one thing i know for sure: you cannot convert the balanced output (XLR) to any other connection, especially RCA or DIN because the output on XLR is something like +10dB and you'll get distortion and messy sound and maybe some cracking you mentioned.

Dunno if this helped but anyway. :)

Kind regards,

Olli

Olli,

Thanks for your reply.

I should correct myself, the connection from the DAC to the BeoPort is RCA (unbalanced output) converted to 1/4 inch jack input on the BeoPort.

The only two inputs on the BeoPort are 1/4 inch jack and USB.

Can you suggest any other type of connection?

David.

Hi David,

You should definitely connect the mac mini to the DAC using a toslink optical cable and not the USB. Most of the DACs out there do not have the special sync function to connect with the computer via USB in a low jitter way. Because the normal USB connection is littered with tons of timing errors/ jitter, it is advised to connect via toslink. This way the DAC will in a sense decouple from the computer's noisy internal. Hope this helps!

Alexander

Well, i don't know how it would be best connected but if the Beoport only has USB and 1/4 jack, the USB being digital is better. Can you connect the Beoport to MacMini and use it that way?

That was new to me too, Alexander. Thanks for the advice! :)

Olli