Wadia 170i and iPod/iPhone question

Hi all,

I am sort of fed up with the 'dropping' of signal over my network and AE, so I decided to go back to use the good old docking system.

I purchased the Wadia 170i last night and hook it up to MF M1 DAC via coaxial. While the out of the box sound is a bit harsh, a good run in for a few hours changed the sound dramatically. I do have a e few questions though:

1. I tried with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 32 GB and all of them worked properly. However, eventhough all of them are synced to the same library and music files (apple lossless and 320 kbps mp3), at the same volume level on the amp, the iPhones sound louder than iPod. Why?

2. Eventhough my CDs are ripped to the same file types above, some files shows a signal at 48.1 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz on the M1 DAC. Any ideas why?

3. What is the function of the Mode button on the Wadia remote? I accidently pressed it and the signal shown on M1 DAC was 32 kbps and there is no more sound coming off the dock.

Thanks all.

I can't comment on 2 and 3 but my own experience with the iPod touch is that even when used with a earphone, the Westone UM3X, the SQ and volume is lower than on both iPhone 4 and 3GS. Maybe it's got a different DAC/audio cct in there.

Thanks modereagle. But by using the Wadia dock, isnt it suppose to extract the digital files from the ipod or iphone, bypassing the internal
DAC?

Yes that's true. Puzzling if you ask me.

Sorry bro not being of much help here.

The one way that I could get both iPhones and iPod Touch to sound the same was thru Bluetooth using the QED uPlay. But I've since realised how much I was missing sonically and am now using a USB DAC with a Mac. The uPlay is a very handy device though.

Hi,
I use the Onkyo NS-D1 digital dock instead - which is similar to the Wadia 170i dock. The output level is the same for me switching between iPhone & iPod touch.

Have you check the "settings" of all 3 are the same? i.e. Go to Settings>ipod>EQ = OFF; and Volume Limit = OFF

On the sampling rate differences you can determine which songs show 48.1kHz and on the PC that you sync the iPhone/iPod, playback this particular song using computer media player (for eg. Foobar) and view the song information being diplayed. Foobar will show very detail information like sample rate, bits per sample, channels, Codec (whether AAC, MP3, FLAC, etc) encoding (whether lossless or lossy) among others.

The mystery on the Wadia still continue.

So far, 2 albums from Bruno Mars and Avril Lavigne, after ripping to 320 kbps MP3 on iTunes and transferred to iPod and iPhone, and played through Wadia, shows that the signal is at 48.1kHz. All other albums are at 44.1kHz.

Is there a new recording quality on CD at 48.1 kHz?

elhefe, u dun rip ur music in AIFF(uncompressed) format? I am using the Onkyo NS-D1 and iPod Classic as my music source. All of my music are ripped in AIFF format. My DAC is YBA WD202, they sound as good as I play through my Cambridge Audio 840C CDP.

Have u solve the problem with the 170i ?