Intro
Contents
The Mutec MC1.2+ is one of those “boxes” that at first you may think: why would I need this? What can I do with it? But once you have it and understand it, you can never do without it again. We are going to explain to you why, because this is a true Swiss army knife!
Regular readers know that we have been using a Mutec MC3+ USB in our system for a long time. This ‘bigger brother’ of the MC1.2+ has a few extra features, such as reclocking and using an external reference clock. Also, the MC3+ USB can send out a word-clock. Useful, but in many cases not at all necessary in a home system.
Back and forth
The power of the Mutec MC1.2+ is that you can go from any interface to any interface. So from AES to BNC, coax, optical and also USB. That goes bi-directionally. And that’s pretty special; there aren’t many digital-to-digital converters that work bi-directionally with USB.
The conversions work up to 24 bit, 192 kHz. Also for USB. So for those looking for 32 bit floating point, or ultra high res up to 768 KHz or DSD…. go look elsewhere. Frankly, we have no real music above 24 bit 192 KHz (the bulk is CD quality and 24 bit / 48 or 96 KHz). So for us, this Mutec MC1.2+ is perfectly adequate.
Internally, we see an Intel Cyclone 10 FPGA at the heart of the converter. Since it is an FPGA, Mutec will have provided it with its own software. We can assume that it takes care of the conversions, since there are also two clocks next to it: 24.576 MHz and 22.5792 MHz. These are for 44.1 and 48 KHz or multiples thereof. We measured these clocks to check the jitter levels. You can see the measurements below.
Plug… play!
The Mutec is very easy to operate. In fact, it’s on and off you go. When you connect the USB port to a PC, for example, you can use any output to connect the box to a dac. We connected the Mutec MC1.2+ via AES to our Mutec MC3+ USB for comparison purposes. That went off without a hitch. The ASIO drivers are the same, which also made it easy.
Switching inputs is done via the two buttons on the front: menu and select. Via menu you go to the right “menu” and with select you select. It’s a bit basic, but it works. USB is switchable between bi-directional or uni-directional.