Wadia 170i and Benchmark Dac1 - anyone try it?

Adasilva,

I was thinking of doing exactly what you are doing above. S350 into Benchmark. Can you tell us more about your settings? Are you forcing 2-channel downmix? Have you verified what is being sent in terms of 16/44.1 or 24/96 and all that? I am very curious about this.

Theoretically, as someone else mentions, if you have 16/44.1 or 24/96 on a disk and play it through the Benchmark it should sound exactly like the same file from an IPod or hard drive.

That is also my understanding.

TeddyBear - the thing is that re-clocking is relatively new. What people are saying is that if the DAC re-clocks the data at its input, then it is independent of transport.

I don't know 100% if this is true, but this seems to be where things are heading. The Bryston also re-clocks.

If you were to do that and let us know I at least would find that extremely interesting. Sorry, I know there is a bit of thread hijacking here, but lots of people are about to create a setup like this, so this is very interesting.

Awesome! I'm glad we pushed the issue.

Okay, back to main topic. I can only speak theoretically as I don't have the Wadia, but since the Benchmark re-clocks, the Wadia should sound the same as anything else.

Remember what re-clocking means. It means that there is something like a buffer device in front of the DAC, and it reformulates the signal, and then feeds it to itself in perfect time (no/little Jitter). So, then, the transports/digital sources are truly just storage.

And some above said data can still get lost with bad transport - well I don't know what protocols are used exactly, but with computer file transfers or TCP/IP there are methods where the computer will ask for the info again if there was a mistake. (It runs an algorithm over the data that results in a single number, runs that same algorithm over the source and compares that number to the other one. It is possible to erronously generate the same number but that is super rare, like 99.999999%) There are virtually no errors in file transfers on computers - otherwise programs wouldn't run! They would get to the place with the missing info and then crash. FTP isn't 100% perfect, which is why people do checksum verification - it uses a different algorithm for validating that the data it has sent is good which is still over 99% but not 99.99999%. So if the music systems are using protocols similar to computers then there really shouldn't be any lost data at all...

The only drawback/advantage with the Wadia is that some people prefer a richer interface and would prefer to spend the 300 just going to music storage server. If you really want to use your IPod as the storage device then the Wadia can't be beat!

Some people are running a long cord from Wadia to DAC, so that they can place the IPod next to the listening position for choosing tracks and all that, rather than having to get up each time.