wadia ipod dock-- anyone find faults?

The key with the wadia is that it does bypass the dac in the ipod, allowing you to use your own dac (hopefully a much better one-which isn't difficult to do considering the dac in the ipod). You do need a dac; the wadia is the first to be given the propriatary info by apple to bypass it.

And...usb is NOT the way to go. Firewire blows it away. Can't believe it hasn't caught on yet.

Gunbei,

My biggest issue with usb were the dropouts. I couldn't get into PC sound as I was just waiting for a stumble. With firewire, there aren't any hiccups at all. The sound with firewire is just more flowing, more musical. I get a nice soundstage, low level resolution, slam, presence of the instruments, air - all which was missing from usb. I don't know of any firewire dacs. I use an MAudio firewire to spdif converter into my dac. Two other issues - first, with firewire, you aren't limited to dacs with a usb input - any dac is fair game. Second, and more improtant - usb was never intended to be used for audio pass through, while firewire was. USB was created to hook up peripherials (printers, mose, keyboard, scaner, etc) and nothing more. USB transmits packest of info - which is't the way to go for pc audio. Firewire streams the data. Much, much better.

Dreadhead, I'm a vinyl guy myself, but it didn't stop me from getting a high end CD (and SACD) rig. The convenience is tough to beat (only beaten by my squeezebox but I do make great compilations with my Alesis Masterlink and do play them on my cd player, and can listen to my favorite pieces of music without getting up). I love vinyl but sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to spend 10 minutes cleaning a disc only to get 20 minutes of music. I love dozing off to one of my favorite pieces of music after a nice glass of wine sitting in my sound room. You can't do that with vinyl. Some of my sacd's give my vinyl a close run. Part of the hobby, to me, is to try to master all of the available sources. I have a macintosh tuner as well - and even though FM rolls off at 15k hz, sometimes, when I'm in the mood to hear new music that I don't know what's being played next, I enjoy it. Don't get me wrong-nothing beats the ceromony of playing a record but, sometimes, it just isn't practical for me.

Dreadhead,

Easy is't always better, but it's always fun.