OK. I am passing on second hand information gleaned from research. The Wadia 301 and 302 are very different CD players because the former has the discontinued Pioneer PD-S505 Stable Platter Transport system which had full disc clamping while the latter uses the Philips VAE-1250. A lot of AudioAsylum members prefer the 301 for its Pioneer disc clamping system. The other major difference between the 301 and 302 is that the 302 has totally redesigned power supply, digital, and analog circuitry that was essentially borrowed from the discontinued Wadia 861, 861b, and 861SE without the TEAC CMK VRDS transport system. A lot of people who either auditioned the Wadia 302 or are current owners have commented about how it is the most radically different sounding Wadia so far. I have heard it at Audio Connection in Verona NJ where I plan to buy it this October 2006. This machine is effortlessly transparent with unreal resolution, very wideband dynamic shading with pointed note attack and realistic decay plus it is one of the few CD players that captures the air surrounding each note along with preserving the original soundstage dimensions intact. Based on my research between analog and digital source components, it seems to me that it is voiced like a vinyl turntable. A chief reason is due to the proprietary Wadia 3.1 DigiMaster software that uses spline reconstruction of oversampled data bits. The Ayre Acoustics CX-7E or C-5xe use the Xilink FPGA software in a two stage up/oversampling strategy: first, it takes 16bit/44.1kHz upsampled to 24bit/176.4kHz, second it takes that to 1.4112MHz. In the process, it leaves the null bits alone and it does not create any new information. The Wadia DigiMaster 3.1 at 24bit/705.6 or 768kHz actually creates a new data structure using spline reconstruction through DSP processing which preserves correct time domain performance. The Wadia 830, 301, and 302 do not utilize the 48lbs monolithic design chassis found in their statement 581, 581i, 781, or 781i or discontinued 850, 860, 861, 861b, and 861SE units. In a nutshell, the Wadia 830, 301, and 302 are evolutionary upgrades to their product line of budget CD players. However, the Wadia 302 is current. New upgrades include upgraded digital and analog boards with no negative feedback just like the Ayre Acoustics CX-7E or C-5xe, better electrical grounding to prevent ground loop hum that lowers the noise floor, and ten times as much reserve capacitance with a newly redesigned switching power supply board that is accurate to 1/2 MHz with isolated outputs. The Philips VAE-1250 is also another big change with the 302. It is a modern CD-ROM drive with modern error correction that is bracket mounted for greater mechanical isolation. The only thing that bugs me about the Wadia 302 is that when I put a CD in and it searches, you can hear it buzzing while it is looking for the disc's data. It is like the external Plextor PX-4824TU CD-R/RW drive that I have that makes this horrible buzzing sound whenever it is reading a disc such as during EAC secure mode extraction. I can hear it faintly through my Ue-10 PRO up close. Wadia chose the Philips VAE-1250 not only because the Pioneer PD-S505 is discontinued, but they feel it produces comparable low jitter performance to that of the PD-S505 for the next 5 years without adding an additional $3500 USD to the price by going with the TEAC CMK VRDS-NEO for their budget entry level CD player. The other major difference between the Wadia 830, 301 and 302 is that the 302 has a redesigned LED display that with larger fonts and there are more hard buttons on the front to control individual functions of this player.
