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The best audio system on earth?

TheFlash said:
You seem to be suggesting that you could prove the presence of a god. Brave!
If you’re not, then nobody can prove a positive either. Which might suggest that nobody can prove anything.

Which might mean we have to somehow muddle along with opinions and experiences and other subjective stuff, and acknowledge that not everything which matters comes with a published, peer-reviewed evidence base. And perhaps try to hold our own opinions lightly.

Tough gig, this life-in-community-with-others thing. Still, at least here on this forum we can relax into the reassuring comfort of a shared interest in which we can enthuse about stuff which few outside the forum would understand. Let joy be unbounded.
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your logic is flawed. Two negatives don't make a positive.


On the subject of things that we may choose to believe, we've already talked about placebos. We've already talked about imagined benefits being very real for the person imagining them. If 2 people are dying but one finds comfort in prayer while the other is an atheist, who's missing out on a bit of comfort in their your of need?
 
cporton said:
Streamer - £230k (Wadax Reference Server - £55k, Wadax Reference Power Supply - £42k, Wadax Reference DAC - £133k)
Pre amplifier - £50k (Engstrom Monica)
Power amplifiers - £142k (Engstrom Eric)
Speakers - £64k (Kroma Matilde)

C
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The Wadax stuff is hard on the eyes.
P1080670-e1639757057743.jpg

Looks like a sci-fi prop or a cheap karaoke machine from the Sky Mall catalog. Probably weighs a lot though, so it’s got that going for it.
 
cporton said:
Streamer - £230k (Wadax Reference Server - £55k, Wadax Reference Power Supply - £42k, Wadax Reference DAC - £133k)
Pre amplifier - £50k (Engstrom Monica)
Power amplifiers - £142k (Engstrom Eric)
Speakers - £64k (Kroma Matilde)

C
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You seem to have missed off the cables 😂
The standard connecting cable is £1250 and the 'deluxe version is £19k.
 
stevec67 said:
your logic is flawed. Two negatives don't make a positive.
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I suggest you re-read the extract of your post which I quoted. And re-read my response.

If you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist and can’t prove that he/she/it does, that’s at least one domain in which speaking of proof on either side of the argument makes no sense at all.

I have no dog in that particular fight by the way, you started it!
stevec67 said:
On the subject of things that we may choose to believe, we've already talked about placebos. We've already talked about imagined benefits being very real for the person imagining them. If 2 people are dying but one finds comfort in prayer while the other is an atheist, who's missing out on a bit of comfort in their your of need?
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See above. I’m not really on this forum and thread to talk about your strongly held belief in atheism. I’d rather have a nice chat about hifi and what might or might not constitute the best hifi system on earth.
 
Darren L said:
That must be in the running for the ugliest hifi component.
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You should see it in silver! Worse to these eyes.
Unfortunately (a) it sounds fabulous and (b) if you poke around their website you will see that much of the shape arises as a direct consequence of the structure of the case to separate stuff from other stuff electrically and vibrationally (made up word).
Whether or not I could live with the looks for the sound quality is of course an academic question as I don’t actually have that sort of hifi budget! If I did, it would be the black one…
 
Tony L said:
FWIW here’s the room in question:


(10 minutes in if my direct link doesn’t work)

PS As many here know I’ve pretty much lost all interest in modern audio. Certainly this sort of stuff. The best audio of the golden age was all about finding new and innovative ways to bring high quality home audio to the majority of listeners. Quad, Klipsch, Leak, Garrard, Thorens, AR, Rega, Naim etc were never cheap, but they were all attainable. Far too much modern audio is the exact reverse to my eyes; the selling of very old technology to a super-wealthy elite just by adding increased mass, bling and pseudoscience. I watched the whole show walk around above and as usual found it hugely depressing. A once innovative and vibrant industry reduced year by year to recursively selling the same stuff encrusted in ever more bling to ever richer people. A quick look inside Trump Tower before the bailiffs arrive.
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This is the world we live in nowadays. In all fields, cars, clothing, etc. It is the IMAGE which counts, both the visual image and brand image of the "thing" you are buying, and the image of yourself, for yourself and for others, that buying that thing provides (although perhaps the latter has always existed.)
Although on this specific topic I cannot express an opinion, not having listened to it.
 
I'm really intrigued as to what the "speed" control is on the DAC. I read a review of the Wadax product which did briefly mention it but I'm none the wiser. It talking about bass speed and timing but I can't imagine what technical aspect it could be adjusting in a DAC to influence this and indeed why you would even want to.
They seem to be using off the shelf chip DACs in this product and some sort of feed forward error correction, which is their main USP. But with very little technical description I'm struggling to work out if Wadax are really doing anything of real value or just adding their own "sauce" to the signal.
 
I don't agree that this system proves statements like valves are better than solid state or that cables are crucial... these are not facts... they are suppositions.

I accept that they mostly chose tracks that would show off the system... but they did play a track I requested that I'm familiar with across a range of previous systems which gave me a baseline on how they compared to, say, an all Linn Active Isobarik system, a Quad ESL system and a Shahinian Obelisk system (to go through my hifi journey over the years!).

The ability to pick out a single instrument and listen to it specifically as if it was coming from its own speaker at a live concert was uncanny... a level of clarity that I've never heard before and also instruments sounding like they were actually in the room... cymbals sounding like cymbals rather than facsimiles of them.

I also did find they were able to communicate an intimate venue when they played something suitably recorded that way... in contrast to some other comments made on PFM.

I assumed this is what listening to a master tape would be like... it made me think that actually, all the musical information is probably already on the digital file... our struggle is to replicate it correctly in the home.

Given how much of the performance level was retained with a different amplifier / speaker combination... if I was going to try one element of the system, it would be the Wadax... and if their "musIC Feed-forward Error Correction Process" is a big part of the performance, that is definitely something that could trickle down to more affordable products over time (fingers crossed).

All IMHO of course :)

C
 
GT said:
I'm amazed we still appear to be having a discussion about the sound of cables, or not, as in the case here. I thought this was all put to bed back in the 1980s when Hitachi came out with the LC-OCC copper cable and every one was raving about how good it was over and above QED 79 strand. I remember all too well visiting HiFi_Dave back in the early 1980s and he had just had a visit from Bé Yamamura who had, with his audio connections in Japan, got Furukawa Electric Co, a massive industrial cable company, to make a very high spec microphone cable with OCC Litz wire and special insulation. HiFi_Dave was going nuts about how good this cable was. Still anything that Bé did was good. I borrowed some of the cable and also heard how good it was. I was just about to order a Helius Orion tonearm through HiFi_Dave and we managed to get it made with Bé's cable for the tonearm arm lead. The tonearm and the cable was amazing and it is still a very good cable today. If HiFi_Dave is on here I am sure he might comment on Bé's blue cable...

I also believe LC-OCC and PC-OCC cable was developed for special applications where high conductivity was required with lower resistivity over long cable lengths. I also know the added value you can make to a piece of audio equipment when internally wiring it with different conductors. For example the difference between an amplifier internally wired with copper cable and one wired with pure silver is very easy to hear the difference. I have also A/B'ed MC transformers with copper internal wire and silver internal wire. It is also very easy to hear the difference. Which is preferred? Well that is not for this thread...
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Speaker cables we know make a difference because they have a significant LCR, often by design as we know in the case of Naim and the Thiele network, and they are in the signal path. This is known science. However the talk here is of the mains cable to the server.
 
OldSkool said:
I'm really intrigued as to what the "speed" control is on the DAC. I read a review of the Wadax product which did briefly mention it but I'm none the wiser. It talking about bass speed and timing but I can't imagine what technical aspect it could be adjusting in a DAC to influence this and indeed why you would even want to.
They seem to be using off the shelf chip DACs in this product and some sort of feed forward error correction, which is their main USP. But with very little technical description I'm struggling to work out if Wadax are really doing anything of real value or just adding their own "sauce" to the signal.
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Quoting from the Absolute Sound review,
”Back to those unique front-panel adjustments. The first of the three, Output Gain, adjusts the voltage of the signal at the Server’s output. The second, Input Gain, adjusts the amplitude of the incoming clock and control signals from the DAC. Unlike most interfaces, the Akasa offers two-way communication between Server and DAC, which allows the DAC to become the system’s master clock and system controller. The third adjustment, Speed, controls the rise time of the Server’s output signal. The adjustment settings are displayed graphically on the front panel. You can program three different combinations of these adjustments for quick recall. Note that none of these adjustments changes the data; they simply affect the level and shape of the bitstream.”
 
I think that's partly the point. Most very expensive show systems I've heard can't even carry a tune.
 
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