Wadia 170i and Benchmark Dac1 - anyone try it?

The Benchmark and Bel Canto are excellent DACs at their price points, but they are not at the very top echelon of performance.

The subject of this thread is Wadia with Benchmark. There's much evidence here that this combination will not be superior to a good stand alone CD player

I think the question was actually what transport to hook up to DAC1 and if there are any differences. The answer seems to be that DAC1 sound is independent of transport & cable & digital input provided the "bits" arriving at the DAC1 are the same (at least many people report this and it is what Benchmark vehemently claim).

Now what "sounds" better or best is, IMHO, a whole other can of worms, which includes the subjective preference of the listener. Certainly a different D to A converter and analog output stage of another high end CDP (removing DAC1 from circuit) is going to sound slightly different - just the same as different DACs will sound slightly different.

Subjective sound preference is hardly "evidence" in the same sense that test results made on the Benchmark DAC1 demonstrate it to be jitter immune and hence transport & digital cable independent (provided there is bit transparency). Note that DAC1 test results say nothing about subjective sound quality - the DAC1 while transport independent may sound terrible to some people. My advice would be to simply listen yourself and buy something more "top echelon" in that case.

Dave, I have an old Audio Alchemy DDSv3.0 right by my right hand :-D

The way I read his question is that he wants to use his iPod in home and car and he has a Benchmark and wonders if the Wadia will be a good iPod transport to interface with his DAC. He mentions CDPs, but his question and his followup clarification seem to be focused on iPod as a transport.

If that is indeed his question, then I know of no device superior to the Wadia for that purpose. I just bought my Wadia and searched for a similar interface that bypassed the iPod's DAC and could find none. (That may change soon). Given the lack of direct competition, I think that the Wadia is the best solution for using an iPod in a high end system.

Some of us attempted to validate that course of action by comparing the output of an iPod/Wadia/DAC trio to the source data played on excellent CDPs, finding it either vary close or, in my case, the same. My experience leads me to strongly endorse the Wadia for the IP's intended use. If he upgrades his DAC later the Wadia will yield further improvement. He seems to like his DAC and I doubt that he'll find something superior without spending a good bit more money.

Dave

Teddy_bear said:
"Dave, I have an old Audio Alchemy DDSv3.0 right by my right hand :-D"

I remember that one and wondering if the extra money for the PS Audio was worth it.

Dave

I believe there is a lot of misinformation and wrong thinking on digital, me included, as I am certainly no expert.

An observation of mine is that I think many of us have an analog mentality of copies when thinking of digital. To clarify, think of taking a photograph and making a copy on a copying machine, then taking the new copy and making another copy, etc. In doing this we expect the quality of each successive photo to be worse.

This is the mentality carried over to digital, which I do not see as an accurate view. I read comments from some where I can tell there is disbelief or hesitation that the iPod copy can sound as good as the CD it was copied from, because it is a copy and “loss” is assumed.

A good analogy I have read to debunk this thinking is of a computer program, it is 1 and 0’s just like digitally stored music. You can copy that program as many times as you want and it will work, if there was any loss the program would fail.

Besides the 1’ and 0’s, there is clocking information passed along in the data stream, this is the information that a DAC can make a difference with, what is known as “reclocking”, not all DAC’s do this. (The DAC in question within this thread, the DAC1, does reclock.)
Again, I am no expert, so anyone more informed than I can feel free to correct and/or add to my comments.

If all I say is accurate, there is no reason the iPod should sound worse than a transport. It is my opinion it is about the DAC one uses.

As for Apple Lossless, many, including myself in the past, viewed this as a compressed format that losses data. This is not the case, if it has been explained to me correctly, hence why those in the know classify it with WAV, AIFF, etc. Here is how it was explained to me. If you have a data string of ‘00000’ (5 zeros), instead of storing all 5 zeros, it would be stored as ‘50’. In doing so, the Apple Lossless file can be converted back to the original ‘00000’, whereby nothing is “lost”.
One more time I’ll add the disclaimer of stating I am not an expert on this.