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Originally Posted by pcf /img/forum/go_quote.gif
So now... I have until Friday at 5pm to decide on my new audio set ups and I hope the iTransporter will be a part of it.
Hi Golden ears,
Just curious-
How come you give yourself such a tight deadline for a decision that will cost you thousands?
Hope you get the right gears.
Happy listening!
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Well, Its either give up a list now so things can arrive for my 45th birthday... or just get mundane things..
Oh... and I am HEAVILY supplementing the cost. lol.
I did pick up this special MIDI Mixer that they only sell here today- and decided on a sound card.. I even saw a vinyl cutting lathe for sale at the VESTAX company store so you can cut your own vinyl- not negatives- but MASTERS! And it wasn't that expensive.
I am ordering a Wadia iTransporter as we speak.. just thinking about putting it in a car- and wondering if with the way Wadia typically reclocks things... if it would sound better than the signal out of a computer or the same. (Who will do the first A/B?)
As a former Wadia 860 owner... I can assure you that if your speakers are truly cutting edge with excellent Midrange and HF transducers (Preferably ribbons or planar magnetics) and clean tight bottom end...you would be blown away by it. IMHO most CD players don't sound as different from each other as say...Phono cartridges. Also you can spend HUGE money for a DAC and have it sound like Crud.. I was sunned when I heard a highly touted DCS Elgar DAC which I felt wasn't much better than any $1500 CD player.
Bu Wadia Products...mind you their top line Products from the 1990's onward are a whole different Animal.
Look you really can't build a budget Bugatti Veyron for 20% less and expect it to perform about 20% less because when you start trying to do that- the whole thing looses its Gestalt. Its like taking a great bottle of wine and marking it down 20% and filling it with a lesser wine. It ruins it.. But this is a different paradigm than trying to stabilize a optical disc that was cut off center, warped and covered with smudges.. I bet Wadia might be able to get as "bit clear" as the transport within the Wadia 860 and its brethren.
So Wadia's lower end CD products... just weren't there- they were still good- but nothing like the 860 and on players. It was almost like they were a different brand. They looked similar but sounded nothing like the big brothers. Lucky for us this is a hard drive transport....and since it is the ONLY hard drive transport... that makes it by default their "top of the line" hard drive transport. And Wadia's first product is typically amazing (though typically expensive) anyone remember the cost of the first Wadia Digital Amplifiers? They were incredible...
So what I will say is this (pause... Deep breath) ...and this is probably exactly what Wadia wants to hear...... is that I KNOW that no one does Digital like Wadia and if I have this nice little Dock........I'm going to want to feed that digital signal into .err...you guessed it...a WADIA CD PLAYER ...and now - its that gateway drug all over... and I've been sucked right back into it.
So I have to go out and audition the new Wadia stuff- compare it to my Old 860 who I sold to a friend with Apogee Diva's (Fantastic speakers BTW) and I'll have to go out and buy another Infinity Reference System and have these huge Stone Henge Towers parade ito my house again. But At least- when friends come over with cool new music (as they always begged to hear stuff on my systems)... I can pop their Ipod in and it will sound great (Provided they use lossless) hey its better than in the 1970's and 80's when I would cringe when someone would ask me to play some filthy record with my $2000 cartridge.
I sort of got out of music for a while because in the 1990's its like the recording engineers gave into the marketing Department and RUINED recordings- remastered them horribly, the Grundge wave was a freeding frenzy and so many bands that probably should not have been signed ...got signed ..and the radio stations playlists were just one big loop.
Vinyl started disappearing (except for DJ's), and the trend towards tiny bookshelf monitors killed complex music because ... you can't get a whole symphony out of a shoe box... and I tell you what... You can't even get White Zombie's More Human than Human out of it either... You NEED the ability to move tons of air and to tightly control your drivers in the peak of the magnetic field.. Taking a small cone and asking to drive its excursion out 2 inches and expecting it to be pistonic well its not sensible and it simply doesn't work.
But now- with internet radio, "music giants", and Moores Law... it will sound better again- and with Indie labels popping up all over there will be newer better music...and Pro Tools (Which always sounded emotionless to me unless done very carefully- is being replaced by far better software...The emotion is returning to music.
So My hope- is that this iTransporter will lure some people into Wadia's mind set.. (there is something better than white ear buds)
and that at some point someone who buys this Wadia will buy a big rig (And frankly anything that was really good as a "Top of the Line Super system" in the mid 1980's is plenty good enough.
For those empty Nesters... maybe they can have a large system again. I just got hooked all over again.
