Inside the box, you’ll find the unit itself, a 60-watt switching mode power supply, a power cable, a USB Type-C cable, and a surprise! A remote control. There’s an impressively detailed Quick Start Guide that will explain down to the smallest details all its inputs, outputs, and use cases. WANDLA arrived double-boxed with a lot of hard foam for better protection during shipping. We will be testing it with and without the HYPSOS in both a headphone and stereo rig and until that happens, let’s unbox it and see what’s inside that package. It goes for €2.795 and you can enhance its performance by getting a smarter HYPSOS power supply for an extra €1195. WANDLA isn’t your regular converter as it wants to be remembered as a no-compromise, chip-based converter that didn’t follow the rules. WANDLA is also a preamp, it can work with the included switching mode power supply or with the HYPSOS for increased dynamics. The real show-stopper was teaming up with the makers of HQ Player developing custom digital filters and then giving users a choice of coding their own filters! This feature was called DDF or Dynamic Digital Filtering which can be changed on the fly for a custom-tailored sound according to your needs. Having a proprietary ARM-based platform called SERCE (heart in Polish) that performs the tasks of five separate chips, the signal path was shortened considerably optimizing the workflow of its digital inputs. It might look like a simple, dandy-looking chip-based DAC on the surface, having a pretty cool touchscreen interface, but once you start digging deeper, only then you will realize that except for that DAC chip, everything else was custom built & coded from the ground up. OOR users no longer need to hunt for a matching DAC and Preamp, as WANDLA does exactly that and a little bit more. We know about the WADLA for more than a year, as these guys are polishing it for quite some time now and I’m glad to announce that it just hit the market. Their ERCO DAC/Amp combo (review here) was the middle ground all-in-one unit everybody was waiting for, but people were still hoping that one day an end-game DAC from Ferrum could be placed atop the OOR, for a neat looking head-fi battle station. In Latin FERRUM goes for ‘iron’, in Dutch OOR translates to ‘ear’, in Esperanto ERCO is ‘ore’ and in German Wandler goes for ‘converter’ and I have a feeling that Slovak’s Hrdza might be used in a future unit, although I’m not sure any of us can pronounce that word without having a glass of wine in advance.Įver since their overly powerful, yet natural-sounding OOR powered by HYPSOS landed at our HQ (review here), we started scratching our heads about when a proper DAC will be released by the same manufacturer. As we already learned in our OOR and ERCO reviews, Ferrum Audio loves playing with words. Although Ferrum’s latest WANDLA looks like their first standalone D/A converter, this band of renegades are crafting D/A and A/D converters for quite some time now. Their parent company has more than 20 years of experience doing EMS, ODM and OEM work, offering hardware and software solutions tailored for all things audio. Banding together in 2020, Ferrum Audio might appear young and inexperienced, but their roots are deeper than you might think and their bark is battle-hardened enough throughout the years.
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