Digital Processor Reviews

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 (footnote 1), 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 streamer-DAC-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.

These components are positioned above Cambridge's midline CX series and below the "reference-level" Edge series (footnote 2). Priced a buck less than $1800, the EXN100 includes the latest iteration of Cambridge's StreamMagic platform (4th generation), an internal computer that plucks music from various streaming services or a home network and feeds the bits and bytes to the DAC, in this case one that's based on the well-regarded ESS ES9028Q2M (footnote 3). The main control interface is Cambridge's user-friendly StreamMagic app, which is available for iOS and Google devices. The EXN100 is certified Roon Ready.

Beyond the full-function streamer, the EXN100 is a DAC with multiple and varied inputs: coaxial S/PDIF on RCA, optical TosLink, HDMI-eARC for TV sound, USB connection to a computer, a USB socket for a flash drive, and wireless antennas for Bluetooth, Apple AirPlay, and Google Cast.

Internet and local network connectivity is provided by an Ethernet port and/or Wi-Fi. Two digital outputs, RCA S/PDIF and TosLink, mean the EXN1000 can be used as a pure streamer with a separate DAC. Users can choose either the balanced (on XLR) or unbalanced (on RCA) analog outputs.

To the right of the large 1280×569–pixel TFT color display screen is a volume control knob—so the EXN100 can function as a standalone preamp in an all-digital system. The StreamMagic app, and the device's on-screen menu tree, include a setting to turn "preamp mode" on or off; set to off, the volume knob doesn't work, and the outputs are at standard line level: 4V max from the balanced outputs, 2V max single-ended.

The EXN100 was designed in England by Cambridge's crack engineering staff and manufactured in China.

Getting it going
I still have the Cambridge MXN10 streamer-DAC I reviewed last year; the StreamMagic app was still installed on my devices. I started out by setting up the EXN100 in my Wi-Fi network: I plugged it in and turned it on. The app was able to locate it by Bluetooth, pair with it, and sign it onto the Wi-Fi network. Then the EXN100 automatically undertook a firmware update, which took several minutes to complete. Then it restarted, and the app took a while to locate it in the Wi-Fi network again, and then all was good. I streamed various albums and tunes from my local network's NAS server (a Synology DS213i, running MinimServer), and from Qobuz, which can be accessed directly from the StreamMagic app.

This first dance with the EXN100 was with my office system: McIntosh MA6500 integrated amplifier driving Amphion One18 speakers. I connected to the amp from the RCA unbalanced output.

Right away, I was impressed with the EXN100's sound. It is quick, precise, and complete, like the MXN10 but even more so. It seemed like I got even closer to hearing everything there was to hear, with my head about 4' away from the small but mighty Amphion speakers, which are located above and behind my computer monitor on Auralex foam wedges that angle them down toward my face.

The multiple voices with Natalie Merchant on her song "The Peppery Man" (from Leave Your Sleep, HD Qobuz stream) were around and behind her, an excellent 3D illusion that served to keep each voice distinct. A very different example was "George's Dilemma" from Clifford Brown and Max Roach's Study in Brown (streamed from a needle drop I made of the Mosaic LP reissue). This old (1955) recording, made at Capitol Studios in New York City, is a great example of a 3D-sounding mono mix. Each musician's sound was distinct. I heard each individual note even when the group played together. 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. All this came through fine with the killer-value–priced MXN10, but with the EXN100, it was cinematic, with a bit more flesh-and-blood humanity to the voices and punch and drive to the instruments.

What's not cinematic is the EXN100's screen, though it is fairly generous. Using the Info ("i") button at the screen's top right, I could change the display to a digital clock or animated "VU meters" (which look cool but don't react like real analog meters, at least not like the professional kind I'm used to), or track and album metadata, with a nice, full-color image of album artwork. From a couple of feet away, I could read the metadata and take in some artwork details, but the screen is too small to be of much use from across a room. That's okay because all the same info is displayed in the StreamMagic app or Roon (often, with the latter, with additional metadata and context information).

The front panel of the EXN100 is attractive. Far left is the power On/Off button. Far right is the volume control. To the left of the display screen are transport-control buttons (skip forward, skip reverse, play/pause). To the right of the screen, under the Info button, are scroll-up and scroll-down buttons. The info button also toggles to device settings, all of which can also be accessed in the StreamMagic app.

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Footnote 1: It could be argued that at a time when a quality DAC is durable yet streaming technology is still evolving, it makes sense to separate those functions. It could be counterargued that firmware updates can accomplish a lot, that streaming tech isn't changing very fast and that having the streamer and DAC close together makes sense.—Jim Austin

Footnote 2: The EXN100 is the company's state-of-the-art streamer-DAC because, while the Edge series includes the Edge NQ, which Cambridge calls a preamplifier with network player, there is no Edge streamer-DAC. See Mark Henninger's Industry Update item about Cambridge's EX line in the February 2025 issue of Stereophile.

Footnote 3: See tinyurl.com/subvwekc.