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Upon receipt of the Jason transport, don't assume the remote's 9V battery is dead if nothing responds. Most likely the keypad is locked. Unlock it according to the silkscreened instruction on the back of the remote [above insert]. Once you do, the display's functionality reminds you there's more to Jason than being just another disc spin jobster. Unpacking it telegraphed already how despite its one rack-space petiteness, Jason is one heavy customer. But he's heavy in more ways than physical weight. Seeing the solid bright bar in the display below the small numbers won't divulge how Jason can control volume. That you'll figure out once you hit the volume minus button and see that bar shorten to the left. The mute button command then confirms by striping the bar as shown above.
TOC capture is automatic once the powered lid closes [requires 17cm of shelf clearance including footers to open fully]. The integral disc clamp does away with any "where's the bloody disc puck" routines. Display brightness adjusts in 8 discrete steps between extinguished and full tilt. Absolute polarity can be inverted with the push of a button. Play commences with a single direct track prompt, no subsequent play input required. Such details bespeak the consummate practicality bequeathed on these components whose plethora of connectivity options safeguard against being left out in the cold should you mix 'n' match with non-Weiss components of any vintage. So naturally, even the layout and organization of the remote is a poster child for rhyme & reason and the owner's manuals are examples of how to do such things right. Even the footers ain't your usual run-of-the-mill affairs.
Cracking the Weiss case might read like the title of a mystery novel but was in fact the far more mundane task of accessing the innards. Merely unbolting the alu covers did little more than reveal the steel cases below. As it turned out, removing the inner cover required nothing more than careful prying with a flat-blade screwdriver.

The motorized lid assembly is a work of simple beauty, utilizing a small quality motor [lower overlay] and toothed wheels.

The output stage sports rather more voltage regulators than might seem intuitive for the job.

The Medea DAC revealed similarly neat layout and adds a shielding partition.

None of the chips were disguised and the only ones relabeled were those custom programmed.

Like Jason's, the output stage on the Medea is quite butch for the low-level signals at hand. Class A, ultra-low stabilized impedance are the operative phrases here.


The combination of hi/lo gain and mono trim pots on the Medea with Jason's variable outputs indicates that amp-direct connection is encouraged. Wadia too has always championed it while facing flak for decimal decimation, i.e. resolution loss by handling attenuation in the digital domain. The Jason/Medea combo allows for the Medea's gain to be parked in the system sweet spot in the analog domain while Jason's digital volume can be used to remotely trim the level from CD to CD by small amounts.
When used with non-Weiss converters of fixed outputs, I wondered whether Daniel Weiss still advocated the amp-direct route seeing Jason's volume might then be digitally attenuated by 50% or more depending on system context. Wouldn't this throw away a lot of rez
a customer had just dearly paid for? Considering how Weiss had demo'd preamp-less with their spankin' new class D Castor amps at CES 2007, the subject could be a foregone conclusion but asking the designer specifically would net his answer, not a shallow presumption: "It is true what you said about the volume control, on the other hand with today's high quality DACs (about 19 to 20-bit effective) and the 16-bit source material, one has about 3 bits to 'waste' in volume control, which is ca.
18dB. 50% on the Jason is 6dB. So even with 25% or less (like 12.5% for 18dB) you are on the safe side. In addition with dithering (as used in the Jason) the signal is not distorted through quantization."


About which the highest-performing interface option between Jason and Medea was, Daniel answered pragmatically: "I usually tell people to judge for themselves what setup they like best (sampling rate, number of wires). Matter of taste, the differences are minute. Usually they select the 'highest numbers'. If they feel okay about that, I do not mind." One unexpected detail on these components are the input XLRs. They lack the usual locking clasps. I had no issue achieving signal lock between Jason and Medea using the twinned AES/EBU route -- the Medea's input 1 and 2 status indicators automatically light up when this connection is made -- but the connectors didn't make a mechanical lock. As it turns out, the clasps were simply removed because they wouldn't have fit below the Medea's RCA sockets.