Wadia 381 vs. dcs Puccini vs. EmmLabs CDSA SE

"we all agree"...i love grand generalizations...

Suffice I don't think vinyl sounds better than all digital today.

Take a 24/192 Reference Recording played back through a State of the Art design digital front end (MPS-5, D3, Scarlatti DAC) against an equivalent spec vinyl system and you are playing in personal preference land. You like the vinyl, me I like that digital.

So I glimpse diminuition or indeed (shock horror, omygawwd) close out of the gap between leading vinyl and digital.

Still the game is still biased - to my chagrin - to vinyl. I've a dozen recordings/albums that afford me a "vinyl equivalent" experience using digital. In contrast excellent vinyl numbers in the thousands (I'll bow to others judgement of whether its more)....

So me thinks its now a software advantage for vinyl more than a hardware one...YMMWV.......

if you can go with puccini&uclock go for it. You'll have the present and the future of digital audio.
I spin discs in the transport because I love sacd discs and of course got over 6.000 cds [sacds incl.] but lately added macbookpro with itunes [thinking amarra or pure music also], plus usb asychronius with furutech usb cable and feed the Uclock and puccini's dac and sounds just marvellous.
In the near future I will add an ipad for further convenience and using it as a remote.

Thanks for your input so far. Will wait for the S7i to come (just placed a pre-order) as this device is according to Wadia their by far best one box offer.

sounds good too!

The only thing i would like to add to this discussion is a to a comment made by Jon2020: "Music would be sold in memory cards like SD, not as physical spinning discs. No more transport problems or disadvantages of hard drives with their moving parts, error correction, reliability, noise and so on. Hmm...that would be just the time to retire the Puccini."

Actually, changing the recording's source (from CD to disk to solid state to whatever) will not obviate the need for a good upsampling DAC, and therefore i see no future need to "retire the Puccini." In fact the upgradable software within the unit, with the U-clock, will hopefully handle these changes in source format reasonably well :)

best wishes to all!
rk