Wadia 170i and Benchmark Dac1 - anyone try it?

Contact Elias Gwinn at Benchmark and let him know your findings. It is possible others have reported the issue and there is a fix or you can simply confirm the problem and stop wasting your time trying to get it to work. Elias may also be able to advise you on which players are known to be "bit-transparent" should you decide to sell the BDP 350 and get something that works with the DAC1.

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.

Follow up on the Sony 350 Blu ray player as a transport to the DAC1. Looks like the 2 ch audio issue has been resolved.

The Sony 350 has a number of detailed Audio Settings which require the on screen menus to adjust. I've set all of the detailed Audio settings to 2ch, down-mix, no compression because I don't use 5.1. The digital output goes to my Benchmark Dac1 via a Cardas 15 digital cable. After setting all of the detailed Audio settings I usually turn OFF the TV to play a 2 ch music CD using the Sony 350 as a transport.

Here's where the problem was. In addition to the "detail Audio" settings there is also a "audio" button on the front of the remote that cycles the Blu ray player through 3 different audio settings. These audio settings do not show up on the "detailed Audio" settings and do not show up on the front display of the player. When I turned the TV back on during CD Music play I could see that the audio button on the remote had kicked the playback out of "Stereo" mode. Turning stereo mode back on fixed the problem.

I have not had any problems with the Sony 350 playing Blu ray or standard DVDs. The Blu ray DVDs don’t take very long to load and the music CDs take just a little longer to load than a regular CD player. I would now recommend the Sony 350; paid under two fifty for it at the Sony store.

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.

I have it with a Bryston DAC. Really incredible sound.