Any improvement of using 2K$ Dac with Cambridge CXN

Sell the CX it is a good streamer but not that good, and as a transport you are going to introduce a lot of jitter.

All the units you mentioned are great.

Mytek Brooklyn Bridge great dac, MQA, good preamp, good heaphone amp.

Lumin great app, MQA fantastic sound quality, makes an excellent transport.

Teac also excellent we haven't tested it.

Auarlic also very good.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin and Mytek dealers

Audioman 58 but we used to sell both the Cambridge and the Lumin.  We had both units in the same system and could a/b both at the same time and in the same system, and there was no contest at all, the Lumin completely outclassed the Cambridge.

Also totally don't agree with you about beating $3k-$4k dacs, the Mytek Brooklyn Bridge is way better, so is the Lumin D2 and the Lumin T2 different league altogether. 


The 851n is the same guts as the 851CD player a 2012 design.

Another fact Lumin is constantly adding features that people want, such as Obouz and MQA,  we stopped selling Cambridge,because we coudn't sell the streamers  as our clients wanted access to Tidal and were not interested in waiting for Cambridge to add Tidal access,  both the CXN and the 851N streamers only had access to Spotify unless you wanted to blue tooth to the streamers. It took them years to finally add Tidal.

Don't think that Qbouz is available now is it, also no MQA.

The general hardware  feature set of the Cambridge units are great, the sound quality is good,  the no Qbouz and no MQA are kind of deal breakers for a popularly priced streamer. 

Sorry to have a very different opinion of the company, they do make some excellent products, the 851N is showing its age it is a good piece for its no lower price with the above mentioned caveats.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin, Mytek, dealers

There are good arguments between the integrated streaming solutions and separates.

One of the reasons we recommend the Lumin products so highly is that both their entry level D2 streamer and the T2 can morph into very good streaming transports, because they have digital outputs, in the T2 a USB output is also there.

The truth is that a properly designed all in one, will almost always beat a two piece dac and streamer, because of the issues which occur in transmitting data and the likelyhood of introducing jitter into the dac.

Are the Lumin's perfect no, but they sound fantastic are extremely well designed, and offer an upgrade path because they have good digital outputs and as mentioned previously Lumin is all on implementing the streaming choices that people want.

MQA is a good option for Tidal users, does MQA sound great yes it does, Will it endure, who knows with the streaming content wars, the good thing either way is how Lumin will always offer the best in streaming services. 

As per Naim and Cambridge always winning What Hifi awards hey they are both British kind of looks like in house nepotisim. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin dealers