Winner of The Absolute Sound Product of the Year 2011 and the 2012 Editor's Choice Award!

Musical Fidelity was pretty well the first company in the world to make a DAC. Since then we have an unbroken lineage of top performing, top value digital products.

The new M1 DAC is the fruit of our 23 years experience of making top performance DACs. It has four digital inputs; coax, optical, balanced and USB.

The M1 DAC will lock on to any S/P diff signal at; 32kHz, 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88kHz, 96kHz and 192kHz. The input sampling frequency is displayed on the front panel.

The M1 DAC upsamples to 24-bit at 192kHz. This is genuine true upsampling.

The M1's technical performance is, pretty well, as good as any at any price. We know this sounds like an incredible claim but it's true. Musical Fidelity's state-of-the-art circuit design and pcb layout with the use of top quality digital components gives state-of-the-art performance. There's no secret or mystery about this. We use top quality digital components in carefully designed circuit configurations which are subtly implemented on brilliant pcb layouts. Unsurprisingly the result is state-of-the-art performance. It's just that the price is competitive so many people find it hard to believe.

The M1 DAC has vanishingly low distortion, typically less than 0.005% across the band. Frequency response is ruler flat. Jitter is extremely low. The noise ratio is outstanding, one of the quietest DACs in the world regardless of price. Looking at the M1 DAC's total measurements and comparing them to any DAC up to ten times its price you will see that, on balance, the M1 DAC is equal to or better than any.

The M1 DAC has a high quality power supply. Interestingly it has choke filtration on the mains input. This, effectively, is a mains signal conditioner which increases the performance and value of the M1 to even greater heights.

User Manual

Stereophile Review
What I mainly heard from the M1 DAC was nothing: an absence of artifacts, if you want to get fancy. There was no fudging of detail, no smearing of transients. Purity of tone was exceptional—and this remained true when I took the M1 DAC upstairs to play with its brother, the M1 HPA headphone amp. So addictive is this DAC that I can't bear to replace it with another—and now I'm commuting with the M1 as I listen. Downstairs. Upstairs. Downstairs again . . .

Tech Radar Review
There is no shortage of competition at or around the £1,000 price point and there will be people who prefer to buy a single box and be done with it, but if you are looking for a player which artfully combines a very natural presentation and brings very little of the character of the electronics to the performance, the M1 system demand an audition.

Hi-Fi World Review
… “An extremely well finished and packaged” …
… “The Musical Fidelity M1 DAC will amaze” …
… “Its combination of insight, clarity, precision and punch are formidable.” …
… “Think of this as a piece of budget esoterica and you’ve captured the essence of this black beauty” …

Hi-Fi News Review
… “The sound was deliciously holographic.” …
… “The instruments in his backing orchestra beautifully spot-lit by the M1 DAC’s sprightly and vivid demeanour. Talk about looking through the recording studio’s control room window.” …
… “The DAC transformed the sound” …