Sprinkle a little DAC magic on your setup

Austria's Musical Fidelity is one of the pioneers of the standalone DAC, and its M6x is its latest invention. Mark Craven ponders the styling before falling in love with the sound

- Mark Craven

CHANCES ARE, YOU use your home system to play music - maybe just casually, but maybe with a critical ear. If it's a case of the latter, you might have wondered whether your current AV hardware is doing full justice to your collection. After all, there's an entire market out there of two-channel-specific products, often with price tags that make an 11-channel AVR look affordable.

Musical Fidelity's M6x isn't in fact part of the cost-no-object hi-fi brigade. Certainly, at £2,099, it's not inexpensive, but other standalone DACs are available that will eat it for breakfast. Indeed, viewed in light of its performance and feature set, the pricing seems perfectly reasonable.

Wired world

Okay, the spec sheet is perhaps missing something you might expect. The M6x is not a networked DAC, meaning it has no truck with music stored on a NAS device, or streamed from a smartphone. There's no Bluetooth either, before you ask.

The reason for this is that company boss Heinz Lichtenegger (also the founder of turntable brand Pro-Ject) believes network and Bluetooth modules are best kept as far away from audio circuitry as possible in Musical Fidelity's newly launched MX-Stream, to be exact.

This does mean that the M6x appears outgunned by other rivals, including some more affordable models like Cambridge Audio's CXN v2 or Bluesound's Node (which even comes with an HDMI eARC connection to accommodate TV audio). Yet Musical Fidelity's device counters with some tricks of its own, predominantly on the inside.

An upgrade on the brand's previous M6, M6s and M6sr DACs, this new model features an improved digital/ analogue conversion stage, this time a dual-DAC design employing ES9038Q2M chips. This brings 32-bit/768kHz PCM handling to the table, plus DSD to DSD512, and MQA (good news for Tidal users).