wadia ipod dock-- anyone find faults?

Dreadhead,

Easy is't always better, but it's always fun.

Another audiophile friend of mine and I hooked up the Wadia ipod dock. I was running MP4s also called Apple lossless through my ipod.

We had read in the new Absolute Sound that the sound was supposed to be just slightly better using lossless and the Wadia. I was excited so I headed out to our local dealer and borrowed one to check it out.

We were both pretty let down once we hooked it up. The sound was not even close to as good as a red book cd. It was a lot more compressed. Lossless compresses a song by 40% and it sounded worse in pretty much every aspect you could rate audio in. You could sit anyone down in front and do an a b a comparison and they would be able to pick the cd over the wadia.

I paired the Wadia with the bel canto dac 3 and then compared it against the bel canto cd 2. Using the same cd that the lossless was ripped off of and the same digital cable to switch back and forth between the two. We tried a few different songs and recordings and they all came out the same. Not so good!

So our verdict is if you want to seriously listen break out your cd's or better yet vinyl. If your doing some housework or something and want some background noise then the Wadia will fit the bill. It is nice to not have to flip through cd's but it is not engaging at all.

I'm going to try to rip the same cd in the wav format and see how that fares. I'll post the results in the next couple days. Only problem is you can't fit that much wav music onto an ipod. It's about 10mb per minute of music which adds up quick!

There are several published reviews, including one on 6moons, where the reviewer indicates they can hear the difference between Lossless and full WAV files via the Wadia 170i.

You may want to give the WAV files a try and report back.

cerrot,
What is the name of the product that transfers the firewire to spdif? So, i can run a firewire from my mac mini into this and output spdif?

I gave it another try with Wav files instead of lossless and they were really close. I still preferred the redbook cd over the wav files but they were at least on the same playing field.

The only problem with Wav files is that they are pretty big and the Ipod isn't. The newest Ipod is 160gb and an average cd is almost 500mb in Wav. This means you could fit 80 cd's worth of music on your ipod. Which is definitely good but the idea of having all of your music in one little device for audiophiles isn't quite here yet.

It would work well if you set up a really long playlist of all of your favorite audiophile tunes. I think I'm going to wait for a bit myself or just hook up a laptop in the mean time.