wadia ipod dock-- anyone find faults?

Another audiophile friend of mine and I hooked up the Wadia ipod dock. I was running MP4s also called Apple lossless through my ipod.

We had read in the new Absolute Sound that the sound was supposed to be just slightly better using lossless and the Wadia. I was excited so I headed out to our local dealer and borrowed one to check it out.

We were both pretty let down once we hooked it up. The sound was not even close to as good as a red book cd. It was a lot more compressed. Lossless compresses a song by 40% and it sounded worse in pretty much every aspect you could rate audio in. You could sit anyone down in front and do an a b a comparison and they would be able to pick the cd over the wadia.

I paired the Wadia with the bel canto dac 3 and then compared it against the bel canto cd 2. Using the same cd that the lossless was ripped off of and the same digital cable to switch back and forth between the two. We tried a few different songs and recordings and they all came out the same. Not so good!

So our verdict is if you want to seriously listen break out your cd's or better yet vinyl. If your doing some housework or something and want some background noise then the Wadia will fit the bill. It is nice to not have to flip through cd's but it is not engaging at all.

I'm going to try to rip the same cd in the wav format and see how that fares. I'll post the results in the next couple days. Only problem is you can't fit that much wav music onto an ipod. It's about 10mb per minute of music which adds up quick!

I gave it another try with Wav files instead of lossless and they were really close. I still preferred the redbook cd over the wav files but they were at least on the same playing field.

The only problem with Wav files is that they are pretty big and the Ipod isn't. The newest Ipod is 160gb and an average cd is almost 500mb in Wav. This means you could fit 80 cd's worth of music on your ipod. Which is definitely good but the idea of having all of your music in one little device for audiophiles isn't quite here yet.

It would work well if you set up a really long playlist of all of your favorite audiophile tunes. I think I'm going to wait for a bit myself or just hook up a laptop in the mean time.

Brian,

I was really hoping the Lossless format would live up to it's name "lossless". But it just didn't. I'm no expert but anytime you compress something I'd be surprised if you didn't lose something from that process.

Your right about fitting more music on your ipod if your using apple lossless but it's still not quite 3 cd's per gb. Which would be getting closer if you weren't taking a significant hit in the quality of your sound.

Take a few minutes and record some wav files onto your ipod. Do an A / B / A comparison between them and your lossless and let us know if you get the same results that I did.

Dave,

I did record my lossless files with error correction.

Have you tried the comparison between lossless and wav yourself?

There are 3 of us here in Minneapolis that have all tried the same test and all of us came out with the same results. With 2 different systems.

Hey Guys I returned the wadia Ipod dock so I can't do anymore comparisons. Although I do have a few final thoughts about it.

In final all I'll say is with my system. Wav files sounded really good on there. Lossless didn't. So if your running wav files and are ok with storing a few less songs than lossless you shouldn't be disappointed.

I have about 90k worth of equipment and it's pretty transparent and detailed. So it's easy to hear each little piece that you switch in or out. I have 3 sets of ears that all heard the same thing on a few different systems. But as we all know it's all about synergy and maybe I just had a bad matchup. Who knows...

It seems kind of a waste of time that one would have to worry and double check to see if there are errors from ripping or if the music sounds the same as the cd.

Wadia is getting close but a few things would help seal it for me in the future. More Ipod storage space. A better remote that could help you control the Ipod with the same controls as the Ipod. Scrolling and searching for music is clumsy in comparison. It would be kinda nice to be able to hook it up to your tv screen to scroll through things as well. Maybe even put out a higher grade dock or an audiophile upgrade or something. I believe there is one offered by someone on audiogon.

Ok it's gettin late sorry to ramble...

~kurt