Now, look at the major elements that constitute the Reference Transport and the whole thing starts to make sense – at least on a mechanically and performance level.
Size matters…
The first thing most people ask, when they see the Reference Transport, is why it needs to be so big and heavy? After all, you can buy a disc transport that’s little bigger and weighs little more than a CD caddy, so why the requirement for something the size of a microwave oven and the weight of an equivalently proportioned block of stone? That’s an especially relevant concern, given that the Wadax Atlantis Transport is around half the height and weight of the Reference Transport, yet still sets a performance standard that no transport I have used to date has been able to match. You might well ask if the Reference Transport is even necessary?
The answer to that lies in the (equally) substantial shape of the Reference Server. A ground up reappraisal of file replay and streaming, it introduced a whole new power supply architecture and kept the data stream away from the noisy network environment, introducing the proprietary Akasa optical link that offered both undisturbed signal transfer and complete galvanic isolation between the Server and DAC. For the first time, file replay was able to approach, occasionally match and very occasionally surpass the optical disc replay performance of the Atlantis transport. Yet optical disc should offer superior performance, if only because it’s a closed system, operating with known parameters that can be individually addressed. It offers a contained field of study, unlike file replay, which is an open-ended system with unknowns and variables that fundamentally impact performance. Just the presence of (and dependence on) the network should give you pause for thought – which is why locally stored files sound more consistent and consistently better than media sourced from streaming services and why the Reference Server distributes its locally stored files without touching the network.
The Atlantis transport is no lightweight, in physical or performance terms. Its in-house designed Thor, mass-loaded, top-loading transport is built into a substantial chassis and runs from a beefy power supply. A dedicated transport only, the digital signal is transferred over a proprietary triple-AES/EBU link that allows transfer of high-res data from SACD or DVD sources, while the sliding lid and elevating transport boss certainly gives it that indefinable ‘wow factor’. It works – extremely well. But it definitely works best when you use it with a DAC that allows data transfer over its triple-AES/EBU link, which means the Wadax Ref DAC. Along with the other salient details, it’s a factor or functional limitation that has carried over into the Reference Transport, albeit in evolved form. But then Wadax are far from alone in that, with transports from both CH Precision and dCS incorporating the same family feeling. When it comes to high-end optical disc replay, increasingly, the transport might be in a separate box, but that box is very much part of an integrated solution.
