It’s a surprisingly heavy five kilograms in weight. The Marantz HD-DAC1 is a fairly narrow unit – it’s only 250mm wide – so placement should not present difficulties.
We've ranked the best headphone amplifiers you can buyĪfter a brief check of the optical and coaxial digital inputs, we used the unit primarily as a DAC for a computer. Neither of these would be a deal-breaker for us, because close to 99 per cent of the music we own is not in a super-high resolution format and we don’t possess a pair of balanced headphones. If we were looking for an Achilles Heel (or two) with regard to the Marantz HD-DAC1, it would be that it does not support super-high resolution formats (352.8/384kHz and DSD512 and beyond), and that it does not have a balanced headphone output. Marantz only specifies the output power for 32 ohm loads – 800mW – and notes that it “can drive audiophile high-impedance headphones up to 600 ohms”. The analogue amplifier uses current feedback amplification and Marantz HDAM-SA2 modules. The chip also includes several top-end roll-off treatments, but these aren’t accessible to the user either. This particular Cirrus Logic chip includes digital volume control with 0.5dB steps, but as we’ll see, it seems that Marantz has not implemented that. The PCM decoder uses multibit oversampling techniques. It has dedicated DSD inputs and can apply a 50kHz filter to ADD inputs to conform to Scarlet Book specifications (that is, the specs for SACDs), or bypass it. This is a 24-bit device with sampling rate support to 192kHz. The DAC functionality is based around a Cirrus Logic CS4398 DAC chip. This is convenient and works well, but it seemed strangely generic and out of place, a clear build quality mismatch with the main unit. The unit is supplied with a plastic remote control. It shows a couple of lines of text, with the default being to display the input selection and the audio format that’s being played. That display is round in shape, as is Marantz’s practice in recent years. That last lets you set the amplifier gain to one of three levels, change auto-standby behaviour and set the brightness level of the display. Underneath that is the standby button and a setup button. On the left side is a rotary input selector. It’s on the right side of the front panel above the headphone output. The third is via another pair of RCA outputs, but these ones are variable in output and controlled by the front panel volume knob.īehind that knob seems to be an analogue potentiometer, capable of turning through the traditional clock-range of 7 to 5. Another is via a pair of fixed-level RCA outputs on the rear. One is via the front-panel 6.35mm headphone output. The Marantz HD-DAC1 can deliver output audio in three ways. The Marantz HD-DAC1 simply takes over from the device’s own audio output. In the case of the iPhone and the only remaining iPod model, the Touch, you control playback using the Apple device’s interface. Or you can plug your iPod or iPhone into it and play its music. You can plug a USB memory stick into that and play (some) of the music thereon. On the front is a flat-type USB connection. It also has a 3.5mm analogue input which you can use with, for example, the headphone output on a digital audio player.
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