With the unit safely out of the case, remove the protective shroud and the Studio Player is finally revealed. One thing that is indisputable about the Wadax Reference components is that they divide aesthetic opinion. I’ve lived with every Wadax product since the original Pre 1, a product that rewrote my own personal digital perspective just as comprehensively as it terra-formed the digital landscape – it just took three generations of product and over a decade for the wider industry to realise that they weren’t in Kansas any more – or that the Great And Mighty Oz might just have been fibbing! Along the way, I’ve been up close with and grown accustomed to the company’s developing aesthetic. But even I found the Reference DAC a bit of an eye-full on first acquaintance. I’ve grown used to it over the years and, it has made more sense as it has been joined by the similarly styled Server, PSU and soon to arrive Reference Transport. Even so, there will be many who breathe a sigh of relief when they first clap eyes on the Studio Player’s more restrained, almost bland appearance.
The tripartite structure of the Reference components has been distilled down into a single, softly curved chassis, the black body sandwiched top and bottom by identical, contrasting colour, contoured caps that hint at the skeletal DNA of the flagship products. The central touchscreen display/control panel mirrors the curves of top/bottom caps, is smaller than you might expect and is located above the metal ‘lip’ of the narrow disc drawer. Apart from the flush fit fastening caps in the top plate (threaded to accept the feet in the bottom plate) and the engraved Wadax logo, that is your lot: positively understated – indeed, almost Levinson-esque – compared to the more flamboyant fascia of the Reference pieces.
The back plate is rather more informative. As well as the RJ45 Streaming input and the normal range of digital outputs (S/PDIF on AES/EBU, RCA and BNC), there’s a PowerCon socket for the up-coming external PSU, daisy chain clock connections, a chassis ground terminal and the balanced only analogue outputs. The dual-mono DACs are mounted side-by-side on separate, slot-in plates – just like the ones in the Reference DAC. Frustratingly, these are not labelled for left and right channel – also just like the ones in the Reference DAC (although that should be changing as you read this). That’s because (just in case you hadn’t heard) these are the very same DACs as used in the Reference DAC, using exactly the same componentry and exactly the same, proprietary MusIC Chip time and phase correction of DAC-induced errors. This load-sensitive process is related to the actual performance of a specific DAC chip, using a sophisticated algorithm to calculate operational stress induced by the constantly varying, in-coming signal and generate feed-forward correction to eliminate the resulting errors. It was the basis of the Pre 1 and every Wadax product since, a process that is both distinct and fundamentally separates the musical performance of those products from almost every other digital offering. The Neodio Origine CD player was a notable exception, while more recently, the CH Precision C10 promises to encroach on those areas of musical performance that have, until now, been the exclusive preserve of the Wadax Reference components. But now we have the Studio Player – and (assuming that it incorporates the Wadax musical DNA) a whole new value proposition.
