Wadia 381 vs. dcs Puccini vs. EmmLabs CDSA SE

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

Keisserg,
Good point. The Puccini can remain as the DAC for a new solid state memory "transport". But as DAC's go, by that time dCS would have improved its upsampling algorithm to maybe 5x DSD or 44.1kHz x umpteenth power. This hobby is going to be a whole lot more exciting! Can't wait but until then the Puccini stays. Cheers!

Hi FrankPiet - the Wadia S7I is a Red-book CD player. (no SACD).