Sit the Studio Player next to the Reference components and that continuity is even clearer. Cutting the cost of a product by a factor of ten means massive change. Although the Studio Player is still recognizably, even obviously, a Wadax product, the adaptations and omissions are equally obvious. A single box design there’s no internal or external functional separation: so, no separate transport or streamer chassis and no external power supplies. Instead, everything from the DAC to the transport, the streaming circuitry to the power supply to drive the entire product has been built into that one, physical volume: with inevitable compromises as a result. But the one thing that has not been compromised is the conversion circuitry and its associated processing. The Studio Player employs the same dual-differential, dual-mono DAC circuitry, component quality and exactly the same error correction hardware and algorithm that you find in the Reference DAC. If you want to understand how much of – or more accurately, which elements of – the Reference components’ performance has made it into the Studio Player, you need to start by understanding what the MusIC process brings to the party.
The Wadax sound – and where it comes from…
In the article linked above, I described the Wadax sound as follows:
The Wadax products have always built their performance on a fundamentally different foundation to other digital replay systems – and the Studio Player is cut from exactly the same cloth. It understands – or rather, allows you to understand – music in terms of shape and pattern: not just the pitch and amplitude of notes, but their placement, the space and relationship between them. You hear it in the easy clarity with which musical phrases emerge, the ease with which a performer’s technique and expressive intent are laid bare, the unforced sense of pace within the music, just as fast, or as slow, as the musicians make it. The sense of natural spatial organisation and dynamic coherence bring body, dimensionality and presence to the presentation of recorded music. The recognisable diction and character of familiar voices is uncanny, especially the range of vocal expression and emphasis.
I could reword that or amplify it, but why bother. It’s pretty much as succinct a summation of what not only makes the Wadax products so musically engaging and communicative, but what separates them from the competition. From day one, digital replay struggled to match the timing, rhythmic integrity and musical flow of the best analogue replay. On the one hand, greater understanding of issues around jitter and digital transfer have improved matters, but on the other, the headlong rush towards the assumed benefits of ever higher bit- and sampling-rates has introduced new levels of stress and scope for error into the conversion process. Digital replay has always been about encoding, storing and decoding digital data without disturbing its inherent patterns. Those patterns extend beyond frequency and amplitude to include, indeed depend on, time and phase information too. The more data you have, the more difficult it is to keep it all in order – which helps explain why up-sampling and high-res recording haven’t provided the universal panacea their advocates claim.
