Meridian G08 vs. Wadia 301 vs. Ack! Dack

dave,

Which transport did you use with Ack! Dac?

Generally, non-upsampling DACs get greatly influenced by a transport it's partnered with.

Hey Dave, sounds like you guys had a good time. Hirsch's home is a perpetual headphone meet

I guess stevieo hasn't taken his Meridian home yet? He better be careful, his statute of limitations is running out...Hirsch might decide that he likes the G08 too much to get it back!

The G08 is a badass player. Mine is supposed to arrive this week from Todd, I can't wait. So did you end up buying the Ack?

Dave1 beat me to the writeup

The first comparison we did was Ack! dAck! compared to the Wadia 301. All sources were connected via single-ended Bogdan Silver Spirit Reference interconnects to a Carlo-modded Melos SHA-1. Listening was done with the PS-1, RS-1, and R-10 (later on). We were able to volume match the sources using the digital volume control on the Wadia, and use the input switch on the Melos to go back and forth. The Ack! was connected to the digitial output of the Wadia.

Comparison 1 was the Ack! and the 301. This is also a comparison of some very different thoughts in digital reproduction. The Wadia uses proprietary digital processing, and a high amount of upsampling to achieve its sound. The Ack! does not upsample, does not oversample, does not have a digital or a brickwall filter, and basically takes a 44.1 KHz signal and converts it to analog using the simplest signal path possible, with high quality internal components. It's battery-powered, taking wall current out of the equation.

We used both the crappy digital cable Dave1 brought and the Ack! digital cable, but there were no obvious differences. I had tested these components together before, and had some idea what to expect, but Dave1 had not heard them together. The first CD was an Eric Clapton CD that Dave1 brought, and with that CD it was clear that the Ack! was suppressing vocal ambience. The Wadia simply had a clearer and more detailed presentation of the vocal. However, this was apparently limited to male vocal frequencies, because we didn't hear any similar effect with female vocals. We also heard some passages where the opposite effect happened. Switching from Wadia to Ack! would occassionally add detail and ambience, particularly at higher frequencies, I think. On some recordings, this resulted in what appeared to be an opening up of the sound stage. More on this later.

Winner of round 1: Sonically, I'd rate it a tie. However, given the price differential, a tie is a clear win for the Ack! dAck! The Wadia had to sound significantly better than the Ack! to achieve a win, given that you can buy five Ack!'s for the retail price of the Wadia. The digital sections of these have a very similar sound, but neither seems completely linear, with each having areas where it's stronger than the other.

Comparison 2 was the Wadia 301 and the Meridian G08. The Meridian has a higher output than the Wadia (and does not appear to have a digital volume control, but we didn't have the manual). Volume matching was done by dropping the stepped attenuator a notch as well as setting the digital output on the Wadia. So, to change sources, we had to change the input and move the SA one step simultaneously. We used identical CD's in each player, timed so that we could switch back and forth seamlessly. The degree of change here seemed to me to be on the same order as the type of changes that we heard between the Ack! and the 301 (Dave1 rates the changes as more dramatic than I did). However, there is an important difference. Every single time, the improvement was in the direction of the G08. Sometimes the differences were almost inaudible, sometimes quite pronounced. However, the G08 outperformed the Wadia every single time, on each recording used. The G08 seemed to be able to retrieve more detail, and present it more coherently, than the Wadia was able to manage. There was a simple clarity and naturalness in presentation that the Wadia could not quite achieve.

Winner of round 2: Meridian G08. This is the best digital source I've heard in my setup so far.

In reviewing my listening impressions of both the Ack! and the G08, it appears that one of the most profound changes I heard had a lot to do with the recordings. In recordings where there was a sense of acoustic space, the Ack! and the G08 both seemed to open up that space better than the Wadia. Where this didn't happen, I suspect that that is a result of those cues being absent on the recording. That leads me to suspect that both the G08 and the Ack! are better than the Wadia at retrieving very low level ambient information.

The good news for me is that in this particular session, the Wadia actually seemed to be closer to the Meridian in sound quality than it had in previous informal comparisons. I just hope it stays that way. While the G08 is clearly the better player, the order of magnitude of the differences were not as significant to me as I thought they would be. My Meridian lust was actually reduced by this session, which had the opposite effect in Dave1. Dave1 found the differences to be much more profound, and I see a Meridian in his future.

To put the level of the differences I heard into some sort of perspective, IMO the differences between the Virtual Dynamics Nite and Master interconnects is more pronounced than the differences between these players.

Also of interest, as a side note, many of the differences that we heard were one-directional. That is, in A/B comparison, you could switch from player A to player B, and hear a distinct improvement. However, in switching back to player A, nothing went missing. So, we shrugged and thought that maybe we were listening to phantoms...but switching back to B produced exactly the same improvement we had heard before. Just to throw out a hypothesis for the time being, the threshold for detecting increases in clarity seems to be lower than the threshold for detecting decreases. This has some implications for A/B testing that require some thought.

At the end, we tried the Ack! with a different transport. Since Ack! had told me that they didn't like Rotel players used as transports, we tried my ten-year old Rotel player. Neither of us heard any significant differences as a result of changing the transport. I'm going to qualify this, since it was near the end of the session and I was already starting to burn out. My sensitivity to small changes may have already been gone.

I ordered my Ack! dAck! after the last Maryland meet, and hope to get it sometime next week (Dave1 has the demo from the meet). Put a decent transport with this, and you've got a digital source that is on a level with a Wadia player. That's got to be one of the killer deals going right now.

Hirsch, the 301 has a selectable output voltage on the back of the chassis. That's what those two tiny switches on the back are. Single ended output can be adjusted from 0.5V to 4V and balanced from 1V to 8V. Check the manual for the specific settings. This is really handy when driving an amplifier directly so you can match the cd player to the amp's sensitivity. The Meridian has a fixed output at somewhere around 2V and has no attenuator.

The thing that made me go for the G08 was its retrieval of ambient detail and space that was not apparent in the Wadia. I could easily live with the detail of the Wadia but the Meridian helped me get closer to my ideal of being transported to the recording venue. With the G08 and Omega 2 everything sounded more spacious and at the same time more natural. Even from meet conditions this difference to me was not subtle.

Thanks for all the info!!! I was really looking forward to all of this as dave knows .
Now I get only more frustrated waiting for someone to sell me a dack, I probably will end up placing an order.....

I'm curious how the results would change listening to a speaker rig as opposed to headphones only.

The Meridian's 2 v sounds louder than the Wadia's 2 v I had forgotten about the voltage adjustment, but the next step (4 v) would have gone way to far the other way.

I think you're reporting the same thing we heard. I love the ambient detail and space of the Meridian. However, I've been doing some power cord shuffling (I can hear Dave laughing from here ) and have gotten my Wadia to a much better level of performance than it was doing at the meet.

The thing that holds all this in perspective for me is the other source in this rig: the VPI Scout. If I sold the Wadia, I could put in some cash and get a Meridian. However, for that same amount of cash, I could upgrade the Scout to Scoutmaster status and also upgrade my cartridge. For me, that would be the "bang for the buck" source upgrade if I make a move.

lol, and he's still laughing...whats the cord of choice right now?

The comparison was done with FIM Silver on the Wadia, and K-Works Empowered PC on the Meridian. As an experiment, I just shifted to the Virtual Dynamics Master PC on the Wadia. However, the VD cables take a couple of days to settle in, so I'm not going to really know if this is a positive shift until mid-week. Early impression is that there is less "edge", and more dynamic impact, but there might be a cost in terms of detail. Still, it sounds a bit more "organic", for lack of a better word. Way too early to tell.

Hirsch,

Interesting. I've tried Ack! with few different transports albeit with speaker systems not 'fones and difference amongst them was rather remarkable.

I used Yamaha CD1 burner, Krell kps25s ( JVC pro transport ), Linn Ikemi ( thier own ) and HD stored file off my laptop. I was dissapointed when Ensemble Dirondo transport did not work ( it failed to lock ) with it.

Could it be all the diffrent transports you used source from the same manufactuers hence sharing the similar sonic traits?

Does Wadia use Teac VRDS transport or Pioneer?

Hi Kuma,

The Wadia uses the Pioneer stable platter transport. When my dAck! arrives, I want to compare to my EAD Ultradisk 2000, which does use the same transport, just to see what happens. I'll probably start going through various players here just to see if one in particular brings out the best (or worst) in the dAck!, or if they actually do all sound the same

I didn't like the Meridian 588 that much, the instrument voicing and separation didn't sound very balanced to me.

How does the G08 compare to the 588?

Oh, and no pics?

-Ed

batteries?

i'm wondering about the whole battery situation on the ack dack. i've heard that it won't power on if power is connected. is it possible to just use the power supply on it?

i imagine it wouldn't be too tough to mod it, tear out the batteries, and put in a nice 12v psu so it might actually be useful for more than four hours at a time. i understand why they went that way and all, i just don't think it'd fit my listening style.

anyway, any information about the use would be helpful for me.