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Self-styled defenders of yesteryear's digital music technologies might wish nothing better than condemn this new-fangled stuff as junk food crap - convenient but empty calories with ill effects on your health. Champions of the new and always better will proclaim CD dead and wireless streaming the already-here future. They'll cite delayed reactions when asked why CD hasn't expired yet. After spending time with the Transporter + Music Vault, I side with the second contingent. But first, a burial about the well-placed concern on wireless and dropouts. While still in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, my Internet access was wireless simply because the location was too remote to get hard-wired service. Not even in the worst of snow storms or sheets of dense rains did I ever suffer transmission gaps. True, the distance to the repeater antenna was little more than a mile and in line of sight. And, such antennae are far more powerful than their little WiFi cousins. But consider the small distances your WiFi signal should have to travel. If you stretch things too far, reduce the distance or get an antenna booster. Had I suffered what theory predicted, I could easily have hard-wired the connection with a short Ethernet link. As it was, I parked the Vault right next to the usual music rack, fed from a Crystal Cable Ultra power cord and Walker Audio Velocitor S passive line conditioner. A short 4' Ethernet link would have reached fine but proved quite unnecessary. In my entire time with the duo, I didn't encounter a single dropout, period. So the bout began at 1:0 for the new.

The convenience of having your music library at the press of a remote button cannot be overstated. 10:0 for the new. Really. But the biggest blow to high-end as it used to be isn't the massive convenience. That alone would sell everyone but the stufft shirts and golden ears. No, the biggest blow is peak performance. That was clear right away. How to conduct the most meaningful comparisons against the old to present the evidence for the new wasn't as obvious. Magnetic data streaming is the claimed advantage of server/WiFi solutions. To send wirelessly received FLAC files converted to S/PDIF inside the Transporter onward to another digital input for further processing and comparison negates that advantage. The only way to compare WiFi on its own terms was to compare analog outputs - one from traditional discs spinning inside my new APL Hifi NWO 3.0-GO; the other from the Transporter's wireless reception. Of course I'd also be comparing 20 x 32-bit conversion and Alex Peychev's ECC 99 tube buffer to 2 x 24-bit conversion and Dan Wright's 6N1P buffer. But, different converter and output stages simply could not be extricated from this juxtaposition.


For a bit of subsequent triangulation however, I could crisscross a Stealth Audio Cables BNC-to-BNC Varidig between the digital i/o ports of either machine; from the Transporter to the NWO and vice versa. None of it would really compare apples to apples. Still, I could generate data three different way, then attempt to -- what's that snazzy digital buzz word -- interpolate. Would my gray matter include fancy Solomon-Reed error correction?


To set the stage, there are those who would claim that a superior RedBook transport is intrinsically superior to the cheap CD/ROM burners used to get music to hard-drive for subsequent streaming. While my Vault loaner admittedly is not entirely your usual computer -- everything non-essential to ripping and storing music files has been stripped and ripped out, including loading its operating system to USB stick -- it does use an apparently quite ordinary 52-times hi-speed CD/ROM drive. By comparison, the top-line TEAC VRDS-NEO in my NWO clocks in at $6,000 on the OEM price sheet - with minimum order quantities of 50. It's the arguably most drastic juxtaposition one could make. Bottom line, the NWO 3.0-GO clocks in at $30,000, the ModWrighted Transporter + 1TB Music Vault at about $5,000, combined. (MacBooks with 1/5th the storage capacity start out at $1,100 to compare in price to the Vault). Then consider the small print. The NWO can only play whatever disc is loaded (though it's compatible with DVD/A + V and SACD). The Transporter/Vault combo can play up to approximately 2,200 CDs stored as FLAC files without ever getting up (actual figure depends on lengths of individual CDs of course).

No genius or college degree were required to recognize that no matter what, the mighty NWO, to 99.99% of the thinking populace -- which by definition excludes the most hard-boiled of audiophiles -- had lost this comparison before it even began. How much better would it have to sound to justify a 6 x price increase plus a wholesale reduction in functionality and convenience? As it turned out, its sonic lead was far smaller than anticipated. The actual magnitude of difference was entirely contingent on the associated amplifiers' innate resolution. I used three different ones - my new Woo Audio Model 5 300B SET with Zu or Rethm speakers; my APL HiFi UA-S1 with DeVore Model Nines; and my loaner pair of Thorens TEM 3200s with the DeVores and my Mark & Daniel Maximus Monitors + OmniHarmonizers. The Transporter had to be attenuated by what its display called 5dB (this will vary with the choice of tubes and their gain factor) to match the NWO's unattenuated output level. In the digital comparisons with the Stealth Audio Varidig, that remained the case. The Transporter's attenuation occurs ahead of the converter in the digital domain. Its digital outputs are as variable as its analog socketry.

My listing of amp/speaker combos was deliberately in sequence of resolution, starting with the least and ending in the most. The Mark & Daniel speakers are not inherently more resolved than the DeVores -- if anything, the opposite is the case -- but due to the high power rating of the Thorens monos, they were ultimately the more appropriate load. In that context, that system provided the most insight. Insight simply meant the biggest difference between sources. As you'll see in a moment, 'biggest' still meant far smaller than anticipated or predictable. The outcome was the same of course regardless of system. Going from most to least resolved once I knew what to focus on merely confirmed it with the 300B SET. However, without the benefit of the German/Swiss über amps, the differences I suspected over the Woo weren't pronounced enough to be clearly identified and put to words. At that level, there was no justification whatsoever to listen to the far more expensive machine. Had I not gone further, the bout would have ended in a 10:0 slaughter for the new.

Over the APL/DeVore setup above, the differences became identifiable but were markedly less than the differences between the APL and Thorens amps themselves. It was only in the context of the TEM 3200 monos that I reliably preferred Alex Peychev's rebuilt Esoteric UX-1. It tightens its focus over the Transporter which is looser and fluffier around the edges and a bit more forward to the Esoteric's more distanced perspective. The NWO improves the treble by sounding softer yet easily as resolved. The absence of remaining grain or glare in the Transporter isn't achieved with a rolloff but by what I assume to be superior treble phase and lower modulation and general circuit noise in the UX-1.


And that was it. Were I a script writer, I'd feel guilty for having set you up, then delivered an anti climax so lame, you'd deserve a refund on your movie ticket. In the scheme of things, the treble advantage of the massively paralleled DAC module in the NWO 3.0-GO is an astonishing achievement. It combines the analog listenability of the Zanden with the data recovery of extreme detail machines. It allows me to listen to a large junk food section of my music library without wilting my pink bits even over my AKG K-1000 earphones for endless but spirited sessions. Think bright Arab Pop and relentless Bulgarian wedding music at full boogie without the usual treble pain. 'nuff said. 10:5 for the new.