Apple TV vs Wadia 170i?

Although I have not used Either... The cheaper, more direct, and quality ergonomics solution for many reasons does point to the Apple TV being the way to go. I am setup for it, but gonna wait it out another year or 2 for better models with a little more space etc... And being movie downloading is starting to catch up it will be an all in one universal solution for me, but there is a few people that see the benefit having their IPOD for portability in the car and being able to just bring it in and drop into the Dock on your big system. For me this is low to no priority so I prefer the best way to actually have a music and movie server if I do it.

I don't know much about the Wadia, however I am a fan of the Apple TV together with an iPod touch as a remote. I use the Apple TV through out the day as a music server. For the ocasional serious dedicated listening session my CDP is just a little more involving.

As i understand the Wadia does not show the menu on your TV so even though it comes with a remote.. you have to be able to see your ipods screen??? which defeats the purpose. The apple TV has a digital out so it is accomplishing the same thing as the wadia by bypassing the DAC in the ipod so in theory it should reproduce sound as well as the wadia.

I just wish Apple would make a really cool audiophile class component out of stainless steel or aluminum that had a huge terabyte size hard drive and coax and optical outs. The wadia sounds cool but the whole remote/display thing kills it for me. i even emailed them once asking about it with no response.

Assuming you will be using an external DAC and not the analogue outs, I would go with the Wadia. I did a fair amount of research on this and found some decent threads on Head-fi.org from people who had owned both. The general drift of the comparisons was that the sound quality of the Apple TV was not as good as the Wadia iTransport, falling short in terms of resolution. (It also has only an optical digital output, which is generally regarded as inferior to coaxial and seems to be losing favor among some DAC manufacturers.) Obviously, the Apple TV has greater functionality for home theater, but for two channel audio I decided to go with the Wadia and have been very happy with it. I don't find the lack of a menu on the Wadia to be a big hassle...just create a playlist on the iPod, plug the iPod into the Wadia, and select the playlist.

These are both intriguing products.The Apple TV has much a much better interface and saves the steps of creating play lists and transferring to ipod. I would think the Wadia would be the ultimate audio boutique machine,in that any customer that came in to listen to whatever gear they are demoing,could snap in their own ipod and bada bing they can hear their own music.I am sure the Wadia has fantastic sound and build quality.Apple products have always been well made and offer excellent support.
I agree it would be nice if Apple would offer a massive hard drive multi output (I2S?)model.