Review on the Rockna Audio Wavelight Pre/DAC just went up on Stereo Times

Hi,

As the North American importer and distributor for Rockna Audio we would like to add a little bit more information as we continue to market Rockna Audio in Canada and the US.

An interesting fact about my company is that we look at the pedigree of the designer when we are thinking about distributing or importing any audio products. The owner and designer for Rockna was the previous designer for Goldmund, PS Audio and MSB and after A/B testing 88 different digital front ends, including dacs costing $50000 USD, the Rockna digital dacs and server are among the best digital we have auditioned. There are many years of digital experience when you purchase Rockna products.  

I also believe just like Terry that there are several very good digital products available on the market today. My personal favorite three digital manufacturers are Rockna Audio, Aries Cerat and Total Dac. From our continued direct A/B testing we believe that the server is as important as the DAC. This is an area where Rockna starts to separate itself from other digital manufacturers. The fact that Rockna has designed and built their servers from the ground up to match their DACs and used the same clocking system in their DACs and servers to match each other perfectly has allowed Rockna to differentiate itself from many other digital manufacturers. In our experience, combining the Rockna DAC with the matching Rockna server via i2S connection resulted in the highest level and most analog sounding digital we have experienced.

Cheers,

Hey Rixthetrick,

Yes, I'm using the Ground Master device with the PSM 156 conditioner and to quote myself from my review it produced "Audio Alchemy" in my system. The change was not subtle, but a qualitative shift in spatial dimensions, utter transparency, and a sense that my room had disappeared from the equation. The Ground Master, including the cost of the seven foot grounding rod and copper wire cost me around $350 and was one of the best investments I have ever made based on cost vs. improvement.  

I've had a new Wavelight for a few days, though I'm also waiting for new speakers to arrive, so can't speak to sonics much yet. Just a couple functional points to add.

While it can be used as a preamp with its analog volume control, there is no physical remote planned and, at this time, just an Android app available to control it via Bluetooth (IOS is "coming"). My experience with the app on a FireHD is it refreshes whenever the control device sleeps or goes into screen save, sometimes it just hangs and loses connection, needing an app or device restart, very annoying. Using it as primary volume/mute in your system, as you would with any preamp, is rather dodge imho. For these guys, who are clearly quite sophisticated, a $30 Apple remote integration would be trivial to do since BT functionality is already there.

The other issue is there is no Roon integration at all, meaning Roon cannot control any of the DAC's features, but especially that nice analog volume control. The DAC appears as a generic ALSA device to my Innuos streamer via USB when using Roon. If Roon's app could control at least volume/mute then the Android app would be a non-issue for those users. I assume this would apply to any Linux based streamer.

Also, DSD seems to be limited to DSD128, though they told me they're working on a solution to enhance DSD for Linux. The spec sheet does in fact say DSD64-512, but does not mention it doesn't do it on Linux (yet).

Ditto to what Jimmy said. I've got the Wavedream Edition SE - it's the one piece I never worry about playing with in my set up.

I don't use mine as a preamp so no comment on the user friendliness. I think the sound qualities of Rockna have been well documented in this thread. Pin point imaging, dense, great layering, detailed yet fluid and organic. It bested both the Yggy and Spring 2 KTE in my set up (as it should for the price delta). 

Have not heard the Wavelight but would imagine many of the characteristics are quite similar. Great company.