Ipod Dock with direct out?????

There will have to be some kind of chip inside the Wadia, as it supposedly has to address the iPod with some kind of coded "greeting" which allows the iPod to output digital. But chips is chips. Personally, I was surprised the Wadia was announced at the price it was. Apple put in that capability for a reason before Wadia ever discovered it. One need's Apple's permission, but Wadia got it, and I imagine others can too.

That said, I too will be interested to read about people's impressions of the Wadia.

T_bone,

Yeah I figure there has to be some kind of chip in there too. I learned yesterday that not all of the pins are used on the Ipod and that one of the unused ones can send the digital signal. You still need to tell the Ipod to do it though. Somebody said it was software but I don't see how that would work(unless you load the software on your computer and then hook up your Ipod and then I don't know what). So I agree it is probabaly a chip that tells the Ipod to send it.

I'm going to assume I'm misreading something at the sound4sale.com page linked above. The upper image is labelled as being an analog output. The lower image is a digital output. Nowhere is the upper image referred to as digital interface jitter that the MSB product solves.

Having done my own Dante's Inferno with jitter a few years ago and realizing my budget didn't allow me to care about it any more than the high speed collisions between my stylus and microscopic intruders in a record groove, I can't much join the several species of small furry creatures gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict over the jitter that is obviously inherent in any device orders of magnitude less expensive than %insert author's DAC brand here%.

I will say this, though. Nowhere can we assume that the flow of information from the iPod to the Wadia is a 44.1khz sampled stream jammed into IEC958 24-bit words subject to jitter. For all we know, the data could move from the iPod to the Wadia just like it moves from the iTunes store to your computer to your iPod in the first place: buffered, with checksums and plenty of time for error correction. The same sort of error correction that ensures I can type the words puck and punt in this post without offending anyone.

On another note, I would advise against opening the box as a method to learn anything about the authentication handshake occurring between the Wadia and an iPod. If the people who advised Apple on how to do it have a background in hardware crypto devices, you can safely assume the chip will break itself if you get too close to it. I have a $32 device on my desk that if I try to open it, the two halves of the chip separate, so tamper proof delaminating chips are well within the price range of a $379 box.

Are we talking lossless files on the iPod? Because if not, I really don't see the merit of spending all this time, effort and money on a compressed signal in the first place.
Given the underlying purpose of iPods (portable audio), why do so many want to use them as home audio, instead of a PC or CD player? Surely even a good universal player (eg Denon etc) would do a better job playing mp3 discs than an iPod?
PS. These are serious questions, I'm not trying to be smart; I really don't get the aftermarket high-end iPod accessory thing.

Carl, I have an iPod that is 160 gig that I have loaded all the CD's I own onto, at least the songs I care about; I loaded these via Apple Lossless and I have used somewhere around 35 gig of the iPod. Some of us find it very convenient to not have to go to the CD cabinet to get music, not to mention choosing shuffle and hearing all our music at random...and when you head out the door, you can take your music collection with you, if you so desire.