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
