A little corner of paradise at work
I bought the WA11 from Woo Audio a couple of weeks ago out of curiosity. I already auditioned it at CanJam SoCal and thought it was a good portable DAC/amp but couldn't say much more than that because, you know, it was at a show and I couldn't use my own music due to some technical issues (a little bit more about that later). One week later I thought to myself that the WA11 isn't expensive for what it is, so I'd like to try it out more extensively and at my leisure. Shortly after that, the WA11 arrived.
As you can see, I already have the Sony WM1Z to use with my IER-Z1R at work. The combo already sounds superb, but I've always thought that the WM1Z doesn't provide enough juice to feed the power-hungry Z1R.
In the beginning, I coupled the WA11 with WM1Z through Sony's adapter for WM1Z, it serving as transport to WA11. This new combo sounds very good, and in several ways I enjoyed them more than I did with Z1R fed by WM1Z alone. Z1R driven by WM1Z does have better depth-of-stage, stereo separation, higher resolution and treble extension but it also sounded a bit dry sometimes. With WM1Z as transport and WA11 as DAC/amp, the music out of Z1R gains greater warmth, more lush midrange, deeper bass extension, and an organic pleasantness that smoothed out Z1R's splashy treble. I thought to myself then that I loved the sound enough to keep WA11 in my collection.
But the clunkiness of the set-up annoyed me. Not sure if you've ever seen the Sony adapter for WM series, but it's big and unwieldly. I didn't think about connecting WA11's line-in port with WM1Z's balanced output because at CanJam SoCal, I learned that WM1Z's balanced out isn't grounded, so it wouldn't work.
Grasping for straws, I asked Jack Wu of Woo Audio whether he could find a way around the problem. To my surprise, he replied that he had built a custom cable (4.4mm Pentaconn to 4.4mm Pentaconn with an additional
2.5mm 3.5mm plug that would be pluged into WM1Z's unbalanced out and act as ground). So I asked him to sell it to me. It's not on Woo's website yet, I think, so if you want it, you should email Woo Audio
The result made me very happy. I now have the best of both worlds: WM1Z's resolution and WA11's organic lushness. I decided to definitely keep WA11 to use at work and for travel.
So aside from what I said above, why would you want WA11 even if you already have something like WM1Z? It's because of the high output impedance of WM1Z poses some challenge with with low-impedance gears like IEMs and, for example, the MySphere 3.1. WA11 solves that problem for you, improves on the sound quality of WM1Z in my opinion, and can help you drive full-size cans that require a lot of power like the Abyss Diana Phi even if you're on the go.
Now if Jack Wu can build me a Unity Smart Case to use with my WM1Z, I would be very, very happy.
Edit: I got the unbalanced part wrong. It's 3.5mm, not 2.5mm
