Musical Fidelity M1 DAC (The One?)

In 1989, Musical Fidelity introduced the Digilog, one of the world's first outboard digital-to-audio converters, or DACs. It was a bold move by a small company. Far larger companies, with more resources, were slower to do something about digital—specifically about the mediocre sound then available from the Compact Disc. Notable for its complacency was the then-prominent British hi-fi company Quad. Their advice at the time was to buy a Philips-based player and attenuate the signal so that most of your gain came from your Quad preamp. Good advice, but the sound still stank.
Thanks to such an attitude among Quad and many others, audiophiles were left with cost-ineffective modified players, or kludges. Problem was, these tweaked players were expensive—lots of skilled labor involved—and mechanically, the basic machine was still crap.

I think Meridian and Marantz were the first to offer CD players of very high quality. Others came around—notably Denon (which still produces some of the best players on the planet), Yamaha, Pioneer, Onkyo, and NEC. (Remember NEC? They got out of the hi-fi business. Stuff was damned good. I digress . . .)

The Musical Fidelity Digilog sold for $995, if I remember rightly. At the time, many hi-fi customers didn't know what it was because the category was being created—by Antony, among others. I remember explaining what it did in my column in October 1989 (Vol.12 No.10). The Digilog helped kill off the kludgemeisters.

Many more DACs followed from Musical Fidelity. I still own the Tri-Vista 21 DAC from 2003 and occasionally fire it up. That one sold in the US for $2395.

The M1 DAC is by Musical Fidelity. At $699, it's a stunning bargain. Comparing it to $995 for the Digilog in 1989. Meanwhile, the M1 is far more versatile, way better built, and, if memory serves me right, sounds vastly better.

It appears that the way to sell a DAC in 2011 is to almost give it away, in real-dollar terms. Some people pay far more than this for a set of speaker cables, a pair of interconnects, even a power cord. The M1 DAC is a piece of kit that can transform your system. I kid you not.

At the moment, the M1 is the only DAC available from or by Musical Fidelity, aside from the even less expensive V-DAC for $299. But we're not counting accessories—the V-DAC comes in a blister pack. Get one before they're gone, for a second system.

"The M1's technical performance is, pretty well, as good as any at any price," writes Antony Michaelson in the product information sheet, which is long on words (like me) and short on specs.

"Pretty well"? That does seem to leave room for a future DAC from Musical Fidelity. If such a DAC does appear, you can safely assume it will cost far more than $699. Meanwhile, save your money and run with the M1.

I am not in a position to judge the M1's technical performance. What, me measure?

Antony continued: "The M1 DAC has vanishingly low distortion, typically less than 0.005% across the band. Frequency response is ruler flat. Jitter is extremely low. The noise ratio is outstanding, one of the quietest DACs in the world regardless of price." Whereupon he invited comparison with DACs up to ten times the M1's price. No one has sent me a $7000 DAC lately. Or a $1000 DAC, for that matter.

Compared to previous Musical Fidelity DACs, the M1 offers more input options: coax, TosLink optical, AES balanced, USB. It locks on to any S/PDIF signal at 32, 44.1 ("Red Book" CD), 48, 88, 96, or 192kHz. All incoming data rates are upsampled to 192kHz. But what about an incoming USB signal? Is that more limited in terms of incoming data rates? Antony was not available and, with the Christmas holiday fast approaching, I didn't find out (footnote 1).

Meanwhile, I could not try the M1 DAC with my Mac mini because it requires the Snow Leopard or later version of the OS X operating system(OS X 10.6). I can't upgrade OS X because my G4-based computer is too old, so I'm stuck with Panther or Leopard. If I wanted to force the issue—work with my Mac's Audio MIDI setup, for instance—I perhaps could, but I didn't want to screw up my settings, since I have got my original Mac mini to work with my Musical Fidelity X-CanV8 headphone amp. (More later.)
Upsampling is that vexatious business involving bogus bits—bogus in that a "Red Book" CD, still my format of choice (heh-heh), has 16 bits, and that's all. Upsampling—which also extends the word length from 16 to 24 bits—is handled by a Crystal chip. Two Burr-Brown chips, in dual-differential mode, handle the D/A conversion. You need to know this? What are you going to do? Antony asked on an earlier occasion. Buy a pair of Burr-Brown chips?

The M1 DAC offers two analog output options: standard RCAs and, for the first time in a DAC by or from Musical Fidelity, a pair of balanced XLR connectors. Dual-differential means that the noise from one Burr-Brown chip partially cancels out the noise from the other. In a high-end Musical Fidelity system—that is, one from Musical Fidelity—you could run balanced from the M1 to a Primo line stage to a pair of Titan power amplifiers. But this is not a big deal. You still benefit from dual-differential mode even if you use the unbalanced RCA analog outputs. Capisce? I wish I did.



John Atkinson himself has called upsampling a "magic bullet." Or did he say it wasn't a magic bullet? In either event, maybe it is, in that the effect of upsampling is to make the most of the 16 bits that are encoded on a "Red Book" CD. You further resolve what is there by adding something that isn't. Digital prestidigitation. Or . . . magic bullet.

Why get hung up on this sh**? The big deal with the M1 DAC is its choke-regulated power supply—in effect, a built-in mains line conditioner. A choke is an inductor. (With its iron core, it looks like a transformer.) An inductor keeps current from changing quickly. This smoothes out ripples in the voltage waveform, and generally results in smoother sound. There are drawbacks: A choke must be properly implemented, or it can almost literally choke the sound quality. Chokes are expensive. One does not expect to find a choke-regulated power supply in a $699 DAC.

While we're on the topic, the M1 does not have a crappy wall wart. You couldn't fit a choke-regulated power supply inside a wall wart anyway. So, if you wanted to, you could go on a binge of power cords—er, power cables. Dealers may encourage you to do this: Wires are where the fat profit margins are.

Mention hyperexpensive interconnects, cables, and power cords, and Antony gets miffed. He rightly points out that overspending on wires results in what he calls "a misallocation of resources"— ie, the customer has less to spend on electronics from or by Musical Fidelity. He told me about one audiophile bloke who spent more on wires than he did on his electronics. He was less than satisfied with his system. You might say that expensive cables wrecked his hi-fi experience. (Antony didn't say; I surmised.)

Listening
I first tried the M1 DAC in our living room, in place of a Cambridge Audio DAC Magic. I used my LFD Mk.IV integrated amplifier, which Antony surely considers underpowered at 50 or 60W into 8 ohms. The LFD is no Titan. Speakers were Triangle's 30th Anniversaire Comètes, a pair of which I hope you acquire while you still can. I used a Sony SCD-XA777ES SACD player as a transport, so I could readily compare "Red Book" CD, through the M1, with SACD, just by switching layers and changing inputs on the LFD. Later, I took the M1 DAC upstairs to play with his brother, the M1 HPA headphone amplifier.

The M1 DAC is one of the reasons I went gaga over these limited-edition Triangle speakers, which cost $1795/pair (plus suitable stands, which you might already own). Je ris mon mauvais rire. This speaker is so resolving and exquisitely extended, and sells for a song. It cries out for an M1 DAC by Musical Fidelity. (This "by" business bugs me. Either it's a Musical Fidelity product or it's not.)

I did not hear a day/night difference between the M1 DAC and the excellent Cambridge Audio DAC Magic, which, at $449, is also a superlative bargain. But I did note an improvement, and perhaps the M1's choke-regulated power supply played a key role in that. I wonder what a DAC Magic might sound like, liberated from its wall wart and given a choke-regulated supply of its own. You'd probably wind up with an M1.

With the M1 DAC, I heard a degree of low-level resolution I'd never before heard from a DAC. I think this may have had to do with the M1's astonishingly low noise floor: an absence of hash, of electronic grunge, of anything that compromised purity or sweetness of tone. La restitution sonore—something that French hi-fi scribes rattle on about, but beer-drinking Britcrits largely ignore in favor of toe-tapping.


There was bite, too. The M1 DAC was anything but too polite—like, perhaps inherently, SACD: the very format seems to round off everything. There are many times when I want my music edgy, even raucous. Been to any string-quartet recitals lately? I have, and the music is meant to put you on edge: that's the point. Don't look to the M1 DAC to make a system's sound excessively polite. Or the DAC Magic, either—by Cambridge Audio.
The sound of brass instruments on fine classical recordings was breathtaking—so alive I almost jumped from my seat. Woodwinds, too, were ravishing. Transients were cleanly, crisply articulated, which is no doubt why brass sometimes came out and bit me on the ass. Maksim, our cat, was transfixed.

Then I did something that for Antony is a total no-no. I used a George Hi-Fi Lightspeed passive attenuator into my 3.5Wpc Sun Audio SV-2A3 amplifier. I can almost hear Antony's disdain. Three and a half watts? Antony would suggest 300W, or even 1000W. But maybe, instead of piling on more power, you should turn down the volume. Or just get a proper headphone amp?

For sure, 3.5W did dynamically constrain the Triangle speakers in our living room, which is almost too large for them anyway, according to the manufacturer's recommendation. But the harmonic presentation was nothing short of flabbergasting. As a former (very poor) pianist myself, I look for the magic of the moment—the sound, not so much the movement, of the notes. I know that, in musical performance, timing is everything. Still . . .

I didn't play a single audiophile-fave recording during any listening session. If an audiophile recommends something, it goes on my no-play list. I deliberately sought out less-than-stellar material, including 1920s and '30s pop and jazz and historical classical performances, especially on the Archipel label. Some of these are reissues of recordings, more than 50 years old, that were once issue on the once-major record labels. (In most the world, where the Sonny Bono copyright law does not apply, recordings 50 years old and older are public domain.) Other Archipel releases are concert performances that somehow escaped into the public domain. These would be deemed "bootlegs" in the US. Archipel deserves exceptional praise for making the best of source material that is often poor—and sometimes excellent!

While I had the Sony SCD-XA777ES as a transport, I tried comparing some SACDs—including one of James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Mozart's symphonies 14, 18, 20, 38, and 41, issued on the orchestra's own label (2 SACD/CDs, BSO Classics 1001)—the once-major labels no longer seem interested in what goes on at Symphony Hall. This is the kind of decadent, full-orchestra, overripe Mozart that Erich Leinsdorf performed so superbly with the BSO. Gemütlich Mozart? Would you like a little Viennese schmaltz with your Köchel listing? Sometimes I do—period performances can be too piercing. Which is to say, I enjoy decadence. The SCD-XA77ES, by Sony, is a superlative machine. Too bad Sony didn't support SACD by releasing more recordings in the format—I might have changed my tune. Too late now.

I strained to hear differences between the two-channel SACD and CD layers. The former sounded more polished, more polite, the latter a little scrappier, edgier. I'm not sure which I preferred—which is to say that the M1 DAC seemed to elevate "Red Book" CD sound to near parity with SACD. Or maybe better. I don't know, I just write. I do know that I loathe surround sound; and if the failure, so far, of SACD has helped preserve two-channel, so much the better. Stereo is a gift from God via Alan Blumlein—a gift like two ears. Or two testicles. Two-channel sound is why I so often flee to headphones.

Summing Up
What I mainly heard from the M1 DAC was nothing: an absence of artifacts, if you want to get fancy. There was no fudging of detail, no smearing of transients. Purity of tone was exceptional—and this remained true when I took the M1 DAC upstairs to play with its brother, the M1 HPA headphone amp. So addictive is this DAC that I can't bear to replace it with another—and now I'm commuting with the M1 as I listen. Downstairs. Upstairs. Downstairs again . . .

Some dealers offer the M1 DAC with a money-back guarantee. Before you judge its sound, let it run in—let it stay on passing music—for at least 100 hours. I think you'll keep it.

www.musicalfidelity.com/products/M1-Series/M1DAC/M1DAC.asp