SMSL’s diminutive M300 DAC measures just 70mm x 160mm x 70mm (WxDxH) and sports Asahi Kasei’s top-tier AK4497 D/A converter.
For an asking price of £200, you get TOSLINK, coaxial and microUSB connections with the latter doubling its duties as a power input.
Within the CNC-machined aluminium case is a second-generation XMOS XCore200 Xu208, which supports PCM up to 32bit/768kHz and DSD512. Two independent Japanese NDK ultra low phase noise crystals provide ultra-low jitter clocks for 44.1K and 48K and their multipliers respectively.
Analogue outputs cover both single-ended RCA and balanced XLR. Having the option of balanced out is something seldom seen at this price bracket.
Up front, information is imparted by a high-resolution colour 1.5-inch IPS display protected by a tempered glass front panel.
Additionally, something rarely known at this budget is that you have a choice of finish as the SMSL M300 comes in black, red and blue.
On paper, at least, the SMSL M300 looks to be a good buy for your office/computer system. Our only sticking point is the use of microUSB over asynchronous Type-B USB, but it will be handy for those using a portable device as their source also, it does have SPDIF and Optical.
It looks like the SMSL M300 will be soon available on Amazon too. It can be had in Europe for €249,00.
Tech Spec
- Input interface: USB, optical, coaxial
- Output level: RCA 2Vrms XLR 4Vrms
- THD+N: 0.0004%
- Dynamic range: RCA 120dB XLR 123dB
- SNR: 116dB
- USB transfer mode: asynchronous transfer
- USB compatibility: windows 7/8/8.1/10 Mac OSX10.6 or higher, Linux
- Bit depth: USB: 1bit-32bit
- Optical / Coaxial: 16bit-24bit
- Sampling rate: USB: 44.1kHz-768kHz DSD64, DSD128, DSD256, DSD512
- Optical / Coaxial: 32-192kHz
- Power consumption: 1.8W
- Standby power: <0.1W
- Size: 70x70x160mm (WxHxD)
- Weight: 0.5kg
Posted in: Hi-Fi
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