Wadia was showing its almost ready-to-ship CD/SACD player, the $15,000 781. (A 781i with digital inputs and outputs is also in the works.) The 781 uses two signal processors feeding a programmable gate array and the company's proprietary DigiMaster 2.5 upsampling software. This, Wadia claims, results in a data rate of 1.4112 million samples per second. The 781 also sports Clocklink jitter reduction for both CD and SACD.

Driving an Audio Research Reference 3 preamp, a pair of ARC Reference 610T monoblocks, and Sonus Faber Stradivari homage loudspeakers, the 781 sounded as dynamic and involving as the analog front end it was alternating with. That was impressive.