wadia ipod dock-- anyone find faults?

hey guys, I had to chime in , I was there for the a-b-a
shoot out at kmelancons and with the gear on hand it was not even close ! I know how people like to exaggerate for effect when discribing what they hear, but the cd had more space , air and presence compared to the wadia, the wadia
seemed to round everything off , this effect was real and very apparent to us, it was not subtle ! maybe with lesser gear it would not be an issue. the idea that the wadia is better than cd sound is a joke. chrissain

Chrissain, which DAC was the Wadia going through and which DAC was the CDP going through?

Thanks,

Dave

Dave,

11-12-08: Kmelancon writes:

I paired the Wadia with the bel canto dac 3 and then compared it against the bel canto cd 2.

Regards,

So you used the DAC3 for both? If so, which digital input did you use on the DAC3 and was the same IC used on both sources?

How does the CD 2 by itself compare to the CD2/DAC3 combo?

I'm not trying to bust your chops. It's just that my experience with the MPS-5's DAC is totally different from yours with the DAC3. Both DACs reclock and focus a lot on jitter reduction, but perhaps there's a difference there. It's easy to understand that the Wadia's ultimate performance is DAC-dependent. Still, I would have expected better performance with a DAC3. I've received excellent reports with the Benchmark and Emm DACs.

Dave

I would like to add:

When I first received my Wadia, I plugged in and connected it to my Playback Designs MPS-5's DAC and started listening. Generally everything was very good, BUT some recordings sounded tonally off, to the extent that vocal character was distorted. Diane Hubka, for instance, sounded a little throatier than usual.

This is despite having ripped all my archive with lossless and error correction turned. Still, I re-ripped several of the offending CDs and the coloration went away.

I having a feeling that, since Mr. Jobs doesn't give a crap about high fidelity, lossless may not be 100% reliable, even with error correction. All were ripped from a crappy computer transport. I have occasionally had to abort a rip because the error correction was slowing things down slower than real-time. When I re-ripped, then the transfer speeded up, but still showed some delay due to error correction.

So, I'm here trying to review the Wadia and I'll say without reservation that it's an excellent performer when fed accurate files and played through an excellent DAC. However, as this thread shows, YMMV.

In my system, third generation files played back through the iPod/Wadia/MPS-5 combination sound superior to the original CDs played through either my Oppo or Pioneer Elite DV-58AV. The same third generation files can't be distinguished from the original CD played through the PD MPS-5 CDP.

Dave