Wadia 170i Ipod Dock Vs Onkyo ND S1 Ipod Dock

A guy from Japan on ebay sells them and they work fine with the switching power supply with USA 120V/60Z current. No import problem.

Mine right out of the box sounded better to me than the Wadia. And, with some reasonably priced mods by Steve Sank of Talking Dog Transducer Co, Tucson, my itouch/Onkyo ND-S1 combo into a Kora Hermes DAC managed to best a friend of mines reference CD player.

It is only a matter of time before someone comes out with a good flash memory player which will best all but the very best CD players.

Yep my wife got me one from a Japanese ebay seller. It is a neat little gadget! I only wish they had it in black - the silver doesn't go with the rest of my setup.

Operation has been pretty good but 3 times now it has made the ipod (in my case my decommisioned 1st generation iPhone)reset for no apparent reason. Anyone else had this issue?

Mark

just had an opportunity to demo a friends 3 week old NDS1. have had an 170i for some time now and really enjoy it. chose a digital cable after trying a few and even upgraded the oem pc ( to audioquest ngr's). think i have my 170i performing as good as it's going to get *for me*, in my system.

spent about 2 days trying to declare a winner here, but couldn't. they both sounded identical to me. without any tweeking and right out of the box, the NDS1 matched the performance of my slightly tweeked 170i. given it's price, the NDS1 seems to be a slam a dunk imho. if my 170i takes a crap anytime soon, the Onkyo looks to be a great replacement option.

am planning on setting up a server based system someday, so neither doc will be a keeper for me. just something inexpensive to get me over the technology hump i see coming in server music systems and interfaces. ps audio (and others) have some very interesting things in the pipeline. hoping the doc can keep me going until then.

BTW...i also compared the NDS1 to my transport and just like the wadia, it was beaten very handily. these doc's sound good (way better then traditional docs that don't bypass the ipods dac), but they're still a notch below a good transport/dac setup imho.

cheers
Lev

Lev -

What kind of files are you feeding the dock? Apple lossless or AAC?

Mark

have been using lossless Mark.

no doubt it's a Apple licensing agreement that's holding the NDS1 out of certain markets. more coin for Apple with two companies paying for exclusive rights. doubt they're long term deals so like everything else in digital audio, expect to see some changes soon.