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In Reply to: RE: used Bryston or Wadia DAC posted by sailor on June 02, 2015 at 10:20:46
I will echo House's sentiments. I have had a Wadia 20 transport and a model 15 dac with the i modification since 2007 and they won't be going anywhere. I would love to hear House's modified 25. As you already know, every system is different, so what sounds good in one may not be up to snuff in another. That being said I really think that you can't go wrong with the 15 for a couple of reasons. The Bryston dac is a regular on A-gon when for sale. As is my nightly custom I will cruise the daily new listings here, on A-gon as well as Canuck and US audiomarts. In the last 4 years, that's 4 years, I have only seen 3 model 15's and 1 model 25 come up for sale. If it turns out that the 15 just isn't your thing you could sell it with no problem. Before I settled on a 15, I spoke with Steve Hundley of Great Northern Sound, who was the Wadia authority (aside from the factory) and he felt that of all the Wadia dacs, the 15 and 25 were the sweet spots in the line-up which included all 3 versions of the model 27 (model 9 aside). As far as RGA's comments go, I have NO IDEA what he bases them on. Wadia was always a small, under staffed and under capitalized company. Until the S7i and 971 they always outsourced their transport mechanisms, The Teac VRDS for the top line machines, the Pioneer Stable Platter for the more moderately priced units and then highly modified them until they performed how they wanted. The technology and design of the other parts were always Wadia's. A 15 needs and deserves a good transport. Follow House's suggestion and get the best balanced digital cable that you can afford and leave it on 24/7 (see owners manual) as it takes about 3 days to sound it's best.
Follow Ups:
You simply can't go by units you happen to see on the second hand market - there is a thing called sales volume. The more something sells the more of then you will see on the second hand market and Bryston sells a whole ton more than Wadia.
I see this argument all too often - yeah I am sure we all see more Ford's on the second hand market than Bentley and Bugatti as well. If you sell 100 times more units you are going to see them on the second hand market - indeed if it's only 4 times as much and not 100 times as much then it's probably doing really well.
The link below is one machine investigated one machine caught. If they do it once who is to say they're not always doing it? This industry has a lot of audio-jewelry issues where small companies are basically adding nice casework (and mostly ONLY nice casework) and then charging top dollar for it. Or they add some $50 of bits and charge idiotic money.
Bryston is bigger - they have economies of scale working for them and in theory should be able to build the same quality as smaller outfits for much less money. They don't need to rebadge Marantz/Philips machines - they can buy a transport but they have their own designers implement the machine. SO their transport used the Philips L1210 mechanism - Audio Note uses the same Philips L1210 transport mechanism and both of them will sound entirely different from one another because each companies designs the rest of the unit. Wadia buys an entire Marantz machine and puts it inside their own casework and charges 5+ times the money. Theta Data Universal did the same thing - took an ENTIRE Philips Laserdisc player - case included - and stuck it inside their own sheet metal and charged $5000 for a $399 Philips player.
Unfortunately they found a reviewer to rave about it and seduce people out of wasting thousands of dollars for a $399 machine (could have bought 12 of them instead).
Chinese companies have also been building gear for many years and American and European companies bought them up and put their own labels on them. Which is why I find it funny that there is so much anti-Chinese sentiment when a lot of stuff is just re-badged Chinese gear from over a decade ago. It is not actually always Chinese knocking off US gear - it's US gear re-badging Chinese made gear - or Japanese gear.
I do not dispute your argument regarding a company basically repackaging an OEM design and exponentially inflating the retail price as a poor value.
Regarding Wadia however, the model you give in your example was early in their development, circa 1990. Their Model 7 Transport, an even earlier design, also used a rebadged and repackaged Teac assembly. This practice was not repeated as the company matured.
To the best of my knowledge, and I seriously challenge you on this, it was never done with their DAC's which used proprietary algorithms, filtration (or lack of it) and output circuitry. I know that all the models I owned which I listed in my prior post were uniquely Wadia, except for the laser/sled hardware already mentioned.
This of course may be true. Which is fine and it may be the other device was a Wadia knock-off - this was also at least a decade back which is why I can't find it on the net and I am at work where I have trouble finding stuff on the net as it is.
I have seen a lot living in Hong Kong where I see products for 1/4 the price here that are not knock-off but basically unpainted versions of brands selling in Europe and the west. Wasn't there also a Chinese duplicate of a Levinson something or other - Red Rose or Red Wine or something like that? This is just the tip of the ice-berg.
My W25came about directly as development of the PowerDAC and much of it was to be applied to the W27ix. It never came about. It was basically just an 11 year old chassis when I got it in 2006. The internal electronics are from the W861 CD player including the main D/A circuit board. The power supply is not modified and is original W25.
The W27 had an analog output level that went up to 9.0 Vrms, which is huge. My W25 goes up to 4.2 Vrms, which is about half that. The 4.2 Vrms will drive almost any system. It accepts 24 bit 96kHz data rates.
The W27 got ridiculously hot, so it's the oddity, not the W25. The W27 dissipated more energy as heat than some small amps. It had 9 layers of cascaded power regulation. The W25 doesn't do that. It has local regulation for each sub-section of circuitry on the main board. The W15 would be the same and runs cool as a result.
My W25 has better high frequency response than any of the W27s, as well as a number of high performance parts that could never be used in a production piece due to irregular deliveries or expense such as Black Gate caps and Vishay resistors. The DAC chips are matched.
As the unit was a project that was never released, no data sheets were ever printed. Measurements were taken during development while work was being done, however nothing was ever published.
The original Model 25 was a larger, more elaborate and costly version of the Model 15 and released approximately the same time. The 15 has much of the advanced technology contained in the 25 and has many of the 25 performance benefits as a result. My unit is 20 years old and has never required service which says something significant about Wadia build quality. This description of performance endurance then can be equally applied to any Model 15 and a purchase would be strongly encouraged.
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