Cambridge EXN100 STREAMING D/A PROCESSOR

Each soloist seemed to pop out to the front, between the two speakers (of course), their life force emerging over decades, grooves, and digital bits.

- TOM FINE

The marriage of little streaming computers to DACs was at first a shotgun thing, a way to add Swiss Army knife capabilities at a price point. That was back when it was cutting-edge to have a NAS server full of digital files on the home network, and when commercial streaming was new, primitive, and lossy. Remember Pandora? Cool idea, but who wants to sit through ads and not be able to skip over more than a handful of disliked tunes every hour. Then Spotify came along. Then Apple and Amazon jumped in, and that's all she wrote. Eventually, streaming even got around to us audiophiles who desired lossless audio of at least CD resolution. Viva Qobuz!

Since streaming became the main mass medium for listening to music, a device that's just a DAC without an attached streamer seems uninteresting, and a poor value,' unless the streamer is a little USB gadget to drive headphones from a phone or computer.

Many hi-fi manufacturers seem to agree, since nowadays the market is flooded with streaming DACs of many sizes and shapes, and prices ranging from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. A sweet spot for build quality, features, and superb sound seems to be between $1500 and $2500. Scan the past two years of Stereophile, and you will find many streamer-DACs and streamerDAC-amplifiers in this price range. In this segment of the market, competition is fierce.

From England, a new contender

The EXN100 is Cambridge Audio's state-of-the-art streaming DAC.

It's half of the new EX line; the other half is the EXA100 integrated amplifier.