ЦАПы — WADAX Atlantis REFERENCE DAC

The Atlantis REFERENCE DAC is a converter made by WADAX of Madrid, Spain, with left and right channels kept apart both physically and electrically in a fully balanced dual-mono design. It belongs to the Reference family, next to the brand's Reference Transport, Reference Server and Reference PSU. Industrial designer Alberto Ochoa states that the chassis starts from 320 kg of five different alloys and needs over 100 hours of artisan assembly.

Key specs that matter

Output is balanced only, through XLR sockets, with a level selectable at 1 V, 2 V or 4 V. The output impedance can also be chosen from a long list of steps between 0.4 ohm and 600 ohm, including 10, 30, 50 and 75 ohm. On the input side there is USB from 32 to 384 kHz at 16, 24 or 32 bits with DSD64, DSD128, DSD256 and MQA, two S/PDIF RCA and two S/PDIF BNC inputs to 192 kHz and 24 bits, and two AES-EBU inputs with the same limits. A native Reference Wadax Link uses three AES-EBU lines and one RJ45 for native PCM and DSD, and an Akasa Optical Module is offered as an option. The unit accepts 100, 120 or 220 V and draws at most 200 W.

Engineering and use context

Inside are 23 separate printed circuit boards carrying more than 5,500 discrete parts, fed by 10 purpose-wound power transformers, each dedicated to a specific function. Regulation runs through 30 local stages and five stages of DC regulation, and WADAX quotes a total rail noise of 0.5 uV from 1 Hz to 100 kHz. Conversion is dual differential, which means four discrete DAC chips in total. The musIC 3 process applies 128-bit feed-forward error correction with 12.8 GB per second of processing and 128-bit internal resolution, together with Adaptive Delta Hilbert Mapping. Digital circuits are time aligned to 100 ps, and the Zepto Reference clock doubles the master clock frequency with 12 fs of total jitter. A 127 mm full-colour capacitive touch display at 800 x 480 is the user interface, while its software is upgradeable over the internet. A card-cage build allows hardware and firmware upgrades through the Wadax at Home cloud system.

Pairing

Because the output level and impedance are adjustable, the converter may connect to power amps without an intermediate stage, or feed a line preamp through its XLR sockets. Within the family, the Reference Transport and Reference Server connect through the Wadax Link.

Alternatives

WADAX also offers the Studio DAC, which adds streaming, RAXA mono modules and a headphone output.