Conventional digital decoding struggles to achieve its theoretical performance: components and circuits never behave ideally, generating a complex, polluting mix of nonlinearities that contaminates the delicate audio signals during and AFTER conversion.

The delicate micro-information and expressive nuances in the musical signal are obscured by inter-reactions between power supplies, clocking, grounding, analog circuitry and the digital to analogue converter. To further complicate things, these non-linearities and error mechanisms are load dependent, varying with signal amplitude. Together they form the core of what we have all come to recognize as “digital sound.”

WADAX technology is founded on the unique musIC process, a sophisticated feed-forward error correction system that operates in the time domain. By mapping the error mechanisms of a chosen DAC chip under load using Adaptive Delta Hilbert Mapping, we can develop an algorithm that examines the incoming signal and calculates the induced error (both linear and nonlinear) that will result. By applying an inverse signal at the input we can real-time correct for the time and phase error that is so musically destructive in other, conventional decoding systems.

This process requires a massive number of mathematical operations and considerable datatransfer: 12,8 GBytes/s. Processing is done at 128 bit internal resolution to precisely render the output and generate the smallest feed-forward corrections. The result is measurably and audibly the most natural and musically communicative digital decoding currently possible – something that’s obvious as soon as you hear the Studio • Player.