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WADAX: R Harley trying to explain a $220k streamer and DAC price….

LesterNZ

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It is an outright insult to EE's everywhere that an audio company claims to very expensively make digitally encoded music 'better' by 'fixing the bits'. Ivor Tiefenbaum's dictum that "If you haven't heard it - you don't have an opinion. Period." is an irrefutable truth in our mysterious Land of Audiophilia. But before you stop reading this just think about Wadax 'bit waveform distortion' and 'waveform dispersion' corrections - at their very HEFTY price.

Electronic engineers have dealt with these electo-magnetic pulse phenomena since Samuel Morse's On-Off Keyed long (& longer) lines, then WW2 radar & sonar, early computer ferrite core memories & spinning HDD's all having pulse sensing, timing, & correction - shaping circuits - often with life & death consequences regarding it being done 'properly'.

Everything digital we use today are dependent on designs from EE's whom insure correct pulse train reading reconstruction and eventual manipulation. So it's "a bit rich" (yes, double entendre') that a major feature of the Wadax units is bit re-shaping etc. There are no real arguments with their extreme efforts with low PS noise & careful interface matching. Although "wave dispersion" at less than 1 metre lenghts is, to put it bluntly, somewhat "stretching the truth". No?

And the TAS Editor muddying the waters by considering the faults of Sony's PCM-1630 and its' NTSC U-matic (60 mins max) 3/4 inch cassette black or white encoded bits in video lines around early analogue speed system spinner mechanisms is not anywhere comparable to todays' tech. Period. Network engineers work for high bit accuracy in modern systems to high level of BER and 'Eye pattern' verifiable proofs as facts.

Throwing big money at these fancy packaged bull patties is so silly it's actually sad. And to repeat, a very foul insult to engineers, technicians and all reproduced music lovers.
 

dananski

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$220k... I really need to get into the fake audio improvements industry. I don't think I'd feel bad at all about taking that money of someone who had that much and thought that was a good way to spend it.

"Are you sick of lossy RF jitter from your mains ground loop ruining your system's musicality? Restore your hi-res bits with our revolutionary Audiophile-Grade Cable Wax! Get your Audiophile-Grade Cable Wax now, only $30,000 a tub!"
 
F

freemansteve

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I lost my jitter, and my friends say my complexion is now that of someone 20 years younger. I then bought one of those "brain waveguides" and have become unimaginably attractive to women.
 
OP
Mihalis

Mihalis

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From the wadax site. heard one of their dacs in a system I know very well. sounded great. this is what they claim (haven't seen measurements from them). anyone technically minded can explain or refute these great discoveries Wadax made? I thought if I am getting bit perfect data Im good...

For years, the computer industry has been built around the total acceptance of bit-perfect copying, essential for the accurate downloading of software and the transfer of data. But from an audiophile perspective, there are a number of issues with current bit-perfect protocols. In theory, a buffered input at the receiver (DAC) end of the transfer prevents cable-induced distortion, but this overlooks two important factors. In any buffered system, the system itself has a transfer function that is constant and thus effectively invisible. But more importantly, digital transfer actually occurs in the analogue domain! The USB encoder has to convert the digital data to voltage square-waves in order to transmit it down the cable, reconverting to the digital domain at the far end. The problem is that producing perfect voltage square-waves is far from simple, even with a purpose built, high-end USB encoder.

Once again – in theory – this shouldn’t matter, as the buffered input clocks and reconstitutes the data. The problem is that this process effectively ‘counts’ data blocks rather than assessing their shape, so that distortion and displacement in the waveform, induced in the analogue domain, remains incorporated in the reconverted digital signal, invisible to the digital encoder. That doesn’t matter in many real-world computing cases, where the raw data is essentially simple binary. But in the case of audio recordings, that data is incredibly time, amplitude and phase sensitive, with small errors rapidly eroding the integrity of the whole.

Once we researched the problem and realised its implications, a whole series of related issues fell into focus. In particular, it explained why different USB cables sound so different – and why different lengths of the same cable also sound different.

The Wadax digital components employ our own MusIC Chip 2 technology, a feed-forward error correction system that compensates for time, amplitude and phase errors in the D-to-A conversion path. Using the same technique – adding the inverse of the transfer function error to the signal – we realised that it would be possible to compensate for the bit waveform distortion in the USB interlink. But whereas in our DACs, we are dealing with a closed system of known elements, with a universal USB interface, the corrective applied would have to be user adjustable. Our response to this challenge is the Digital Waveform Control, a set of three rotary knobs that allow users to adjust/compensate for errors in the rise-time and amplitude of the sent signal as well as the spacing on the return channel (counteracting echoes and reflections). Users can establish three, pre-set compensations, to match the replay characteristics of different streaming services or locally stored files.

The results are as readily audible as they are musically significant, finally lifting high-res file replay to the level of musical performance that it has always promised – yet so seldom delivered.
 

Darkscience

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From the wadax site. heard one of their dacs in a system I know very well. sounded great. this is what they claim (haven't seen measurements from them). anyone technically minded can explain or refute these great discoveries Wadax made? I thought if I am getting bit perfect data Im good...

For years, the computer industry has been built around the total acceptance of bit-perfect copying, essential for the accurate downloading of software and the transfer of data. But from an audiophile perspective, there are a number of issues with current bit-perfect protocols. In theory, a buffered input at the receiver (DAC) end of the transfer prevents cable-induced distortion, but this overlooks two important factors. In any buffered system, the system itself has a transfer function that is constant and thus effectively invisible. But more importantly, digital transfer actually occurs in the analogue domain! The USB encoder has to convert the digital data to voltage square-waves in order to transmit it down the cable, reconverting to the digital domain at the far end. The problem is that producing perfect voltage square-waves is far from simple, even with a purpose built, high-end USB encoder.

Once again – in theory – this shouldn’t matter, as the buffered input clocks and reconstitutes the data. The problem is that this process effectively ‘counts’ data blocks rather than assessing their shape, so that distortion and displacement in the waveform, induced in the analogue domain, remains incorporated in the reconverted digital signal, invisible to the digital encoder. That doesn’t matter in many real-world computing cases, where the raw data is essentially simple binary. But in the case of audio recordings, that data is incredibly time, amplitude and phase sensitive, with small errors rapidly eroding the integrity of the whole.

Once we researched the problem and realised its implications, a whole series of related issues fell into focus. In particular, it explained why different USB cables sound so different – and why different lengths of the same cable also sound different.

The Wadax digital components employ our own MusIC Chip 2 technology, a feed-forward error correction system that compensates for time, amplitude and phase errors in the D-to-A conversion path. Using the same technique – adding the inverse of the transfer function error to the signal – we realised that it would be possible to compensate for the bit waveform distortion in the USB interlink. But whereas in our DACs, we are dealing with a closed system of known elements, with a universal USB interface, the corrective applied would have to be user adjustable. Our response to this challenge is the Digital Waveform Control, a set of three rotary knobs that allow users to adjust/compensate for errors in the rise-time and amplitude of the sent signal as well as the spacing on the return channel (counteracting echoes and reflections). Users can establish three, pre-set compensations, to match the replay characteristics of different streaming services or locally stored files.

The results are as readily audible as they are musically significant, finally lifting high-res file replay to the level of musical performance that it has always promised – yet so seldom delivered.
This is total BS don't believe this garbage. Different USB cables do not sound different. It is data you are transferring, not a musical signal. Same when using a computer monitor or any other digital device in your life. Imagine if online gaming had this problem? When you download a file, a FLAC or whatever from the internet how does your computer store it? It also has to travel 100's of miles through fiber optic networks and copper lines. It arrives on your computer just fine, and you save it just fine and reuse it just fine. But for some reason when it transfers via USB cable to an audio device it degrades, how unfortunate. BTW I am not technically minded and can still decipher the BS.
 

Powerbench

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Correct me if I am wrong but the data from a video game is probably waaaaay more complex playing over the internet with bit rates and speeds than music ie. playing BF3 with 100+ players online but must more data streaming than any music….
 

Palladium

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Correct me if I am wrong but the data from a video game is probably waaaaay more complex playing over the internet with bit rates and speeds than music ie. playing BF3 with 100+ players online but must more data streaming than any music….

I just had a Steam popup saying my 500Mbps Wi-Fi doesn't have a soundstage wide enough for game downloads.
 

phoenixdogfan

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If anyone of these companies could objectively prove their equipment was superior to their competitors, they would take out full page ads in every major audio magazine.
Kinda like if cancer could be cured with a megadose of St. John's Wort, why wouldn't that be published in Nature?

These kind of scams exist because stupid people aren't just stupid, they're also cynical. Hence the proliferation of conspiracy theories, snake oil, et al.
 

PierreV

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That doesn’t matter in many real-world computing cases, where the raw data is essentially simple binary. But in the case of audio recordings, that data is incredibly time, amplitude and phase sensitive, with small errors rapidly eroding the integrity of the whole.

01010000 01110010 01101001 01100011 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100001
 

Darkscience

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Make sure you pair it with a Mad Scientist Heretic Ethernet Cable, they claim the difference when using their cable is so drastic, you will feel like your breathing in the the air the singer is exhaling. It is only like $400 per for 1 meter of cable I think, imagine how that will sound paired with the Wadax Streamer?
 

DWI

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There are more than enough people out there to buy a product like this without even looking at the price, or giving it a second thought. Unless their name is James Dyson or Musk, they are unlikely to be engineers and hence uninterested in the engineering. If it's the best, they'll want it. One reason why they may think it's the best is because it's the most expensive, it wouldn't make much difference if it was more or less expensive.

So if you're complaining about the price and value for money, or concerned for starving migrants, I think you've missed the point.

You just need to get over being poor, or poor enough not to be able to afford a $220k DAC, and that people who wouldn't notice this expenditure don't look at the world the same way you do.

Such people are unlikely to be stupid. They are likely to be very clever. I've not met many stupid billionaires.
 

Martin

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I stopped reading when I read this line: "The sound changed even though the bits representing the audio signal were identical." :rolleyes:

Martin
 

Darkscience

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There are more than enough people out there to buy a product like this without even looking at the price, or giving it a second thought. Unless their name is James Dyson or Musk, they are unlikely to be engineers and hence uninterested in the engineering. If it's the best, they'll want it. One reason why they may think it's the best is because it's the most expensive, it wouldn't make much difference if it was more or less expensive.

So if you're complaining about the price and value for money, or concerned for starving migrants, I think you've missed the point.

You just need to get over being poor, or poor enough not to be able to afford a $220k DAC, and that people who wouldn't notice this expenditure don't look at the world the same way you do.

Such people are unlikely to be stupid. They are likely to be very clever. I've not met many stupid billionaires.
I do not know if this is directed at me or who, but I am not complaining about jack shit. Personally I am making fun of the claims, it is like reading comedy to me and actually very entertaining. I guess you need to be an engineer to understand why this is funny.

As far as price I could give a shit what it costs and who or who can not afford what, like I said not the point. Oh yea and I am not poor, but wtf does that comment have anything to do with this? If I was as rich as shit I still would not buy that garbage? Trust me I do not want to buy this, ever, I could be a trillionaire, not in the cards for me, I have a brain and it will not allow my hands to hand over the money for garbage electronics.
 
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