Krell KID vs. Wadia i170.

Good to hear , I just heard the I170 ran into a Wadia 581 using its DAC. It was good. The music was compressed but still was good. I may look into one !

Hello,
i own both and they are connected with Krell KPS 25 sc 24/96 cast II.
The Wadia 170 has Acoustic Zen digital cable to Krell digital in.
The Krell Kid has symmetric Siltech cables to Krell analog in.

The Krell Kid sounds definitely better, more analog, soundstage is bigger the vocals are much better.Krell has as much detail than thru Wadia 170.The Wadia 170 in comparison to Krell KID is more digital sounding.I use only WAV files on my I POD Classic 160 GB.

I have not made the comaprison, but I just sold my Reimyo CDP777 for the Wadia 179 and an external Reinyo DAC. Really hard to tell the difference from both with the convenience of having all my music avaliable thru the iPOD.

My two cents here

How can an analog signal from a simple Ipod be better than the it's digital signal converted to analog through a high quality D/A converter? How good the Krell might be, the bottleneck is still the Ipod derived analog signal. The built in DAC inside the Ipod is quite good (Wolfson?), but of course an external high quality D/A converter is still better (better power supply, better internal parts, etc.).

Chris

I just added a Siltech digital cable to the Wadia/Reimyo set-up - just great! - the CDP777 is gone...