I recently bought one from Ebay as Its one of my favorite designs - while I've not yet had a chance to compare against the MDAC (as its only Single ended output and I only have balanced cables also no preamplifier) I suspect its better then the MDAC in certain areas.
Its certainly my favorite design by far for Cambridge Audio - very underrated....
Heres one on my lab Bench ATM with Fred's HDCD chip under test:-
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86116171/Isomagic cropped.jpg
You can use with just a BNC / optical SPDIF, make sure the little silver toggle switch on the rear is flipped in the up position if your not clock-locking it to a suitable CD transport.