wadia ipod dock-- anyone find faults?

Gunbei,

My biggest issue with usb were the dropouts. I couldn't get into PC sound as I was just waiting for a stumble. With firewire, there aren't any hiccups at all. The sound with firewire is just more flowing, more musical. I get a nice soundstage, low level resolution, slam, presence of the instruments, air - all which was missing from usb. I don't know of any firewire dacs. I use an MAudio firewire to spdif converter into my dac. Two other issues - first, with firewire, you aren't limited to dacs with a usb input - any dac is fair game. Second, and more improtant - usb was never intended to be used for audio pass through, while firewire was. USB was created to hook up peripherials (printers, mose, keyboard, scaner, etc) and nothing more. USB transmits packest of info - which is't the way to go for pc audio. Firewire streams the data. Much, much better.

Dreadhead, I'm a vinyl guy myself, but it didn't stop me from getting a high end CD (and SACD) rig. The convenience is tough to beat (only beaten by my squeezebox but I do make great compilations with my Alesis Masterlink and do play them on my cd player, and can listen to my favorite pieces of music without getting up). I love vinyl but sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to spend 10 minutes cleaning a disc only to get 20 minutes of music. I love dozing off to one of my favorite pieces of music after a nice glass of wine sitting in my sound room. You can't do that with vinyl. Some of my sacd's give my vinyl a close run. Part of the hobby, to me, is to try to master all of the available sources. I have a macintosh tuner as well - and even though FM rolls off at 15k hz, sometimes, when I'm in the mood to hear new music that I don't know what's being played next, I enjoy it. Don't get me wrong-nothing beats the ceromony of playing a record but, sometimes, it just isn't practical for me.

Cerrot, all very valid points, hence my journey into the world of digital posts. I am slowly weaning myself from my vinyl dependency, and with the help of knowledgeable people like yourself and the all the other fine folks who contribute to posts like this it could and should be a fun ride. Thanks for your help guys.

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!