Part II: The DAC shoot-out (Cambridge Audio Azur DAC Magic Plus vs. Musical Paradise MP-D1) by Mark Morris Equipment used: Musical Paradise MP-D1 DAC Cambridge Audio Azur DAC Magic Plus System 1: – Home-built PC – ACER T232HL 23” touch-screen monitor – Denon DCD 1520 used a CD transport – Cambridge Audio Azur 650BD used as CD transport – Garrard 301 in double granite plinth with Moerch UP-4 arm and Charisma Audio MC-1 moving coil cartridge/Cascade 2.2 moving coil pre-amp into modified Jolida 9 phono pre-amp (MM inputs) – Sonic Frontiers Line 2 pre-amplifier/Sonic Frontiers Power 1 and Radford STA-15 MkIII power amplifiers – KEF 107 Reference loudspeakers System 2: – Pioneer Elite CLD-97 LaserDisc/CD player – Cambridge Audio Azur 650BD Blu-Ray DVD/CD player – Mark Levinson ML-1 Pre-amplifier/Sonic Frontiers Power 1 and Crown Power Line 4 amplifiers – Apogee Slant 6 (bi-amped)/2x Velodyne CT-100 subwoofers The complaint about any digital music source, compared to a good analogue front end, has always been that the sense of palpable presence isn’t quite there in the same way. It’s expressed in all sort of forms: dry, a tendency to hardness, not the same sense of space around instruments, and so on. [...]
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