Esoteric Players: No Digital Input. WTF?

Very, very few players have digital in. It's digital out that makes the most sense. Connect your ipod directly, wtf?

Tarsando -

I could not disagree more (about digital out making the most sense). Why would I buy an expensive player like the Esoteric, and choose to bypass the excellent dac that is built in? Alternatively, wouldn't it be great to be able to use that nice dac that I paid for with my 500 gigabyte library of lossless music? All I would need to do is plug in a $300 Squeezebox to the digital in, and I could control playback with my Iphone.

Off the top of my head I can think of many players that have a Digital in. Just to name a few:

Resolution Audio Opus 21
Wadia (all recent models)
Cary 306/200, 306 SACD
Cambridge Audio 840C
Mark Levinson 390
DCS P8i
Simaudio Supernova
plenty of others...

What do you even mean about the Ipod? I never even mentioned if I had an Ipod. Are you recommending to use an Ipod's dac, connect the analog out to a high-end system, and expect high-end sound?

Going with the Ipod example, wouldn't it be a lot better to plug it into the Wadia dock to get a real digital out, and plug it into my CD player's digital input?

Playback Designs is another great player with several digital inputs. I love it and plan to use it later with a server. For now, I use a Wadia 170i iPod dock to use my iPod Classic 160G as a mini-server. The Wadia bypasses the iPod's internal DAC and the PD's DAC upconverts the 44.1hz signal to DSD, applies an alogarythm or two and produces great sound from lossless files ripped with error correction.

I wonder sometimes is Esoteric and Emm are worried about cutting into their separate DAC and clock sales. It's just something that pops into my mind as I consider various CD/SACD player options. When you're spending lots of money it's nice to get complete functionality out of all the parts.

Dave

As usual, one must go much farther up The Esoteric line to get the feature set found with the competition. You have to use one of their stand alone dacs to get inputs.

F&A... Every high end SACD player should have a digital in... even before redbook. And how about a USB in that does I2S conversion.