Wadia 861, Levinson 390S, or EMC1MKII

For me the Wadia has preference over the ML! Much more musical. ML is as sharp as a knife which might be good for special listening situations but I found it fatigueing. With the Wadia you just hear MUSIC.
Good luck!

There is no need to even compare the EMC1Mk.II to the Wadia
and Levinson players. It is clearly not in the same league.
I would prefer the Wadia, but you will need to test both
in your system to find the absolute match.

The 861 must be very different from the 860. Cause the 860 sounded like anything but music in my room. Bleached midrange and extremely poor PRAT.

I would not consider any of them. If they do not have high rez capability they are a dinosaur. Read past threads concerning Wadia's customer service.

Chuck

There is a "Wadia 861" thread running in parallel to this thread & this is what I posted there as well:-

I had the opportunity to listen to the Wadia 861 in a friend's system. His system consisted of all-Gryphon(Danish) electronics & Dynaudio Confidence 5 (these are older speakers & out of production now but they sound better than today's Confidence series, IMO).
I can say that the Gryphon Adagio CDP beat the Wadia 861 convincing in my books.
The Wadia is etched in the high freq. extremes & it deceivingly gives the impression of more resolution & clarity. That is not true! It is distortion one is hearing. The Gryphon CDP is much more natural sounding over the entire audio band. In comparison to the Wadia 861 I thought that the high freq were rolled off but upon critical listening I found that all the content was there - it was just presented in more naturally.
Also, on the classical music that we were playing comparing the 2 CDPs, the Gryphon had better microdynamics as it was better able to flesh out the lower level details vs. the Wadia 861.
The Wadia 861 can be modified by Great Northern Sound & this might get rid of the etched high freq. I don't have any experience w/ this mod & am only mentioning it.
All-in-all I'd call the Wadia 861 an audiophile's CDP, one where the user is listening only to the sound of his/her system. The Gryphon CDP is a music lover's player, one where the user is listening to the music coming out of his system & where sound is only a means to an end - the music.

FWIW. IMHO. YMMV