170i – CD-Quality Digital Audio
Michael Trei: Sound & Vision
February/March 2009
Choral music can be a particularly brutal test for revealing problems with digital audio. Playing “Voca Me” from the album Free by the English boys’ choir Libera, I detected no audible differences whatsoever between the original CD and its WAV file played through the 170i. This result was repeated for each disc I tried, and at times I actually felt that the 170i version might have sounded a tad more spacious and open. Whether this was just my imagination or a case of the Wadia dock providing the DAC with a more robust digital stream remains open to debate! Nevertheless, any perceptible differences were truly infinitesimal.