User Manual
15
ENGLISH
DacMagic 100
azur
The driver is available from www.cambridge-audio.com/
DacMagic100Support.
Use with Macs
No extra drivers are required. With the DacMagic 100 
switched to USB Audio 1.0 the DacMagic 100 will work 
with the native Mac OS-X 10.5 (Leopard) or above Audio 
1.0 driver and accept audio up to 24/96kHz.
With the DacMagic 100 switched to USB Audio 2.0 the 
DacMagic 100 works with the native Mac OS-X 10.5 
(Leopard) or above Audio 2.0 driver and can accept audio 
up to 24/192kHz.
Use with Linux
For most builds of Linux with the DacMagic 100 switched to 
USB Audio 1.0 the DacMagic 100 will work with the native 
Audio 1.0 driver and accept audio up to 24-bit/96kHz.
Some very new builds of Linux are now supporting USB 
Audio 2.0 for which the Dacmagic 100 should be switched 
to Audio 2.0 support to accept audio up to 24-bit/192kHz.
For both cases, because Linux builds vary according to their 
creators choice of software components (including drivers) 
it is not possible to guarantee operation and Audio drivers 
may need to be loaded.
‘Class drivers’ as they are called for generic support of 
Audio Class 1.0 or Audio Class 2.0 devices may be available 
from the Linux community, we do not supply these.
Bit perfect transfer – ASIO and WASAPI Exclusive 
mode
The DacMagic 100 USB interface hardware and software 
support bit perfect transfer.
Whether or not the audio sent to the DacMagic 100 is 
bitperfect (i.e. not resampled or mixed etc. by the PC) is 
actually a function of the playback application and the 
operating systems audio engine.
By default the standard windows audio drivers (often called 
WDM drivers) included in Windows XP support MME or 
DirectSound transfer, both of which include a kernel mixer 
and re-sampler stage.
One way round this is to use ASIO to bypass this. Another 
is to use a playback application that supports its own form 
of kernel streaming, i.e. if has its own way of outputting the 
audio without invoking the kernel mixer.
For Windows Vista and Windows 7 a new method of audio 
transfer is supported called WASAPI. This has two modes; 
Shared and Exclusive. Shared mode is similar to MME or 
DirectSound but in Exclusive mode the kernel mixer/re-
sampler is bypassed and bit perfect transfer is possible 
with only one audio playback program directed to the 
soundcard at a time (for instance system sounds are not 
mixed in).










