I’m excited to announce a collaboration product with Ferrum, the WANDLA GoldenSound Edition!
The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition has six key aspects:
– Elevated digital headroom – Many modern musical tracks are produced in a waythat leaves very little headroom in the recording, often referred to as the Loudness Wars, This can cause clipping and additional distortion during playback on most DACs due to the oversampling filter being unable to accurately reconstruct strong transients. The WANDLA has its own digital processing headroom, but GoldenSound Edition has elevated headroom to accommodate it to its additional DSP functions, which are described in below paragraphs. Therefore, WANDLA GoldenSound Edition is highly immune to intersample overs even in bypass mode at full output level, allowing you to play back any music free from additional distortion, and enjoy a higher quality sound. Moreover, due to its DSP functions, now this sound can be even more tailored to your personal taste.
– Spatial Enhancement – The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition features a unique spatial enhancement that utilizes the power of the Ferrum SERCE module to provide an expanded soundstage and improved clarity of separation between musical elements, whilst avoiding the drawbacks commonly found in other approaches. A Headphone Mode and a Speaker Mode are offered to provide an enhancement tailored to each use-case, and this is achieved without any coloration to the frequency response, no additional distortion, and no tricks like added reverb.
– Tube Mode – The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition features a tube mode, which intentionally increases the even-order harmonic distortion produced by the DAC, similar to the distortion added by a tube amplifier. This allows the user to enjoy a warmer, richer sound without directly changing frequency response, and without the other drawbacks commonly found in tube based devices such as increased noise.
– Impact + – The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition features an Impact + function for those that enjoy a little more low-end in their music listening experience. Though rather than a basic bass-shelf, this feature uses a customized two-band EQ which not only elevates bass but provides additional punch and dynamic impact.
– No MQA – The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition no longer uses any MQA processing, with all content being kept as untouched PCM other than if you choose to enable one of the sound tuning features. All of DSP functions of WANDLA GoldenSound Edition are extensively using processing power of WANDLA’s SERCE module. Therefore, to ensure seamless operation, MQA decoder is not available in GoldenSound Edition.
The WANDLA GoldenSound edition will be available exclusively at https://headphones.com in North America, and through Ferrum dealers in other regions.
– Hardware Voltage Adjustment – The WANDLA GoldenSound Edition benefits from a hardware level output voltage adjustment, allowing the user to swap between just below 10 Vrms output to a just below 4 Vrms output. This is facilitated via a dedicated hardware voltage divider in the output stage of the DAC, allowing the user to select lower output voltage and ensure compatibility with all amplifiers, without a need to use any digital volume control, or to have analog volume control components in the signal path. This hardware voltage divider will be available on the standard edition of WANDLA and WANDLA GoldenSound Edition units starting with board revision v4.0.
Revisions older than v4.0 will support this functionality but do so in a slightly different way. These revisions will use the existing analog voltage control instead. While we originally intended to achieve this by digital attenuation, new insights brought us another, better solution. By using the analog voltage regulation, we can even get older revisions of the WANDLA board closer to v4.0, where this functionality is achieved by hardware as well, but only by a different part. This solution means all WANDLA users will be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor.
It will retail for $3295 exclusively at headphones.com (LINK)
For existing WANDLA owners, a conversion will be available for $600 at a later date.
Conversion means the user will receive a GoldenSound edition firmware, which can be flashed to their WANDLA. This firmware will be specific to their unit and the process of conversion will be reversible
I did not understand if a software upgrade will be available for current WANDLA gen1 owners.
Lack of MQA will be missed by those who invested in a files library (like myself).
How does the impact eq look? +3db from 80 and down? Can you change the eq?