This is a review and detailed measurements of the Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus DAC and "digital pre-amplifier." It is on kind loan from a member and costs USD $349 from the company itself or Amazon with Prime shipping. Researching the unit, it seems to have come out around 2012. Yet it seems to still be a current unit seeing how Cambridge still sells it.The industrial design of the DacMagic Plus falls in line with the rest of Cambridge Audio products which is somewhat understated but fine looking nevertheless:This is called a digital preamplifier because it has multiple inputs and a volume control. There are also selectable output filters and a headphone out. I did not test the headphone output because it seems to have pretty high output impedance.Back to volume control, it has a horrible feel. It is a rotary encoder meaning its value is digitized and used. As such, it has no minimum of maximum like an analog control would. That is fine but what is not fine is the stiff feel of it. Usually rotary encoders are rather lose with detents. Neither is here. Furthermore, I found that it jumps in rather coarse values.Likewise, the on/off button is quite stiff. Fortunately you don't need to use it as often as the volume control.No remote is provided which is sad as hard to use the volume control/inputs selection in a home system without it.The back panel shows off the extensive connectivity of the DacMagic Plus:Great to see a set of balanced outputs in this price range and from a western brand. There are coax and Toslink inputsoutputs!Power is provided by an external switching supply about twice the size of typical mobile phone adapters.Interesting to see the ground lift switch. That might help with ground loops although the balanced XLR outputs should obviate the need for such.I was impressed to see the ISO9001 marking for quality manufacturing and of course CE regulatory markings.As usual, we start with our dashboard using USB input:This is balanced output. As noted RCA out is a couple of dBs worse. Specification is more or less met with 0.001% THD+N distortion+noise. The figure is dominated by the third harmonic at 3 kHz to the tune of -100 dB. This puts the DacMagic at the threshold of tier 2 and 3 DACs tested:Dynamic range is pretty good and is worth 18.5 bits (111/6).Intermodulation distortion shows the same positioning as THD+N does:A bit higher noise level (downward sloping part of the graph) and distortion (rising part). Not quite as good as our best in class DACs but competent nevertheless.Jitter measurements shows excellent results:Someone paid good attention to clean power and clock/reference signals. The only thing we see is noise which is benign.Linearity is also unusually good:Likewise multitone output is as expected with nothing bad jumping out:THD+N versus frequency using wider bandwidth shows the higher noise floor noted earlier:There are three filter settings. I did all of my testing with Linear Phase. Here is its response:Switching to minimum phase shows clearly clipping due to overshoot:It is best avoided.Here is the steep filter:I measured the frequency response of the three using white noise to see the transition band response:Both the linear and minimum phase filters have very low amount of out of band attenuation (just 19 dB). That will cause aliasing of the high-frequency components, polluting the high frequency components. Steep filter does a much better job (purple), providing nearly 60 dB of out of band reductions at 22.05 kHz (ideal would be infinite amount).The Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus gets a lot right here. It is nice looking with tons of features including balanced output. It is from a high-end audio brand yet it doesn't costs too much above budget produces. It is clearly well engineered with nothing other than clipping in minimum phase filter standing out. Its performance is probably limited by the Wolfson DAC chip landing in the lower middle of DACs tested.The inclusion of XLR balanced output makes up for measured results to some extent and pushes me to put the DacMagic Plus on my recommended list.: Headphone measurements here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...s-of-cambridge-dacmagic-plus.6887/post-153184 ------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.Snow has melted but now I need gas money to go and pick up all the packages piled up at the post office. So please considermoney using: https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview ), or https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054 ).