Cambridge Dacmagic? Real improvmt or hype?

I love Toslink myself. But that shouldn't matter. I'm more likely to believe that the dacmagic is your weak spot considering the rest of your gear. IMHO. Have you considered trying out some other higher-end dacs in your rig? You may be surprised.

Regards

Wow you guys are the terrific! I have enough suggestions to follow to keep me busy till New Years. Thank you so much for all your responses. Thanks so much

I have never been able to notice a difference between coax and toslink, on either the dac magic I used to own, or my current dac, which is a PS Audio DL III. But I bet if you went and spent $1000 on a digital coax cable, you might just be able to convince yourself that it makes a difference ;-)

If you need to use toslink, glass is the only way to go. I use a Sonicwave glass toslink cable that I bought for about $25 on Amazon. Beat every plastic (aka fiber optic) cable I've tried.

As stated, glass toslink if the way to go if you must use toslink. A cheap plastic toslink cable can cripple even high end DACs that presumably are immune to jitter. Time and time again I hear people pushing toslink around here. My experience and many others at say the CA website, indicates that when toslink is better than coax, there is some other issue at work. FWIW, it is the same signal. S/PDIF gets converted to toslink by receivers at each end.

By using coax or glass toslink you are likely to gain some dynamics/PRaT at the minimum. To me it often sounds like what you might think the difference is looking through glass versus plexiglass. There is a diffusion that is unmistakable...

My 2 cents.