New for CES 2012 from Spanish high-end manufacturer Wadax (www.wadax.eu) is the La Pasión speaker, a three-way digital active design carrying a price-tag of $106,500 (£69,000).
From the Madrid-based company responsible for the PRE 1 universal digital preamplifier, which costs $27,800 (£18,000), the new speaker has a tweeter driven directly by its onboard DAC using a specially designed current output stage.
Built-in 400W digital amp modules for the midrange and woofer sections, with the option of external amplification for the midrange.
The electronics are all housed in a mechanically isolated section at the base of the speaker, and while the speaker is designed for use with a digital link between source, preamp and drivers, there's also an analogue input and built in analogue-to-digital conversion.
Wadax says that 'In the quest for uncompromised sonic purity, there are no elements between the drivers and the power amplifiers. No cables, caps, inductors or resistors. The same D/A electronics inside the PRE1 Universal preamplifier are used inside each speaker.
'This allows maximum utilisation of the Wadax proprietary musIC chip which manages the crossover, mechanical non-linearity corrections, amplitude and time alignment and all other signal processes'.
