I have just bought the upgrade to the ilink. The upgrade makes the ilink upsample to 176.4 Khz. Now the ilink is a complete different monster to the wadia. Now the gap between the 2 docks are obvious. All the good stuff associated with upsampling is true about this ilink upgrade. I wasn't expecting this, but I'm hearing instruments in familiar recordings that I never heard before. I thought you may like to know. MSB made a good decision to widen the gap with the wadia. The only complaint would be that MSB could have thought of this without an upgrade now. But the difference is no longer subtle
msb Ilink vs. wadia 170i ipd docks
I have finally gotten a weeks worth of critical listening of the msb ilink and the wadia ipod docks and I must say that the msb is truely better in every way and it's not subtle. I am running them both directly to the benchmark dac/pre and through atc scm20-2 active speakers running balanced with an analysis plus gold coax cable. The detail is much higher in the msb, the bass is not as tubby, and it's almost like a blanket was lifted off the speakers after I switched to the msb. I know there is a huge difference in price but I know alot of people were on the fence about this one so I wanted to help them put and give my 2 cents worth. This ipod dock is pretty killer and I can't even imagine what it's going to be like when I hook it up to a great dac.