radio-now.co.uk | news | Cambridge Audio announced DAB500 digital tuner

Monday, 7th July 2003
Cambridge Audio announces enhanced DAB digital radio tuner

Certain to strike a chord with fans of DAB digital radio, Cambridge Audio has announced the successor to its award-winning digital radio tuner. The new DAB500 includes a number of audio upgrades.

The new design uses a 24 bit/192KHz DAC (digital to analogue converter) with built-in 4x upsampling, supplied by Wolfson Microelectronics. The power supply to the tuner has been split, with the analogue stage and Cambridge Audio's NCT (Natural Contour Technology) benefiting from this move.

The NCT feature allows the sound to be subtly altered to give a more balanced sound to high-processed broadcasts. A three-stage control on the rear of the tuner can be set at "low" to add weight and warmth to the sound, "high" to offer a fuller, bolder delivery or "neutral" to bypass this feature.

The DAB500 can arrange stations by most-played, listener favourites or alphabetically and the jog dial allows you to scan up and down for stations.

The new tuner can scan for stations automatically, plus there's a signal strength meter indicator if the direction of the aerial needs to be adjusted to improve reception. Band III reception is catered for.

Station information and scrolling text is shown on a dimmable blue display and up to ten presets can be stored in memory.

Gold plated analogue, coaxial and digital outputs are provided as standard and, helpfully if you're running out of inputs to your amplifier, the tuner even includes a connector allowing you to "piggy-back" your existing FM separates tuner onto the DAB500.

Available in August, the DAB500 will be distributed through Richer Sounds' hi-fi stores and will retail for around GBP149.99.

The Cambridge Audio DAB500, which debuts at Richer Sounds stores in August