The stock stainless steel cones are certainly no slouches. They offer a solid, rich, coherent presentation, leaning slightly to the warmer side and favouring fluidity over transparency and resolution. It’s certainly a musically satisfying result – but it’s also one that can be altered or improved. If you want greater transparency, focus, dynamic resolution, more explicit separation and location of images and a more immediate, agile sound – at the expense of a leaner overall balance – then substituting Finite Elemente Ceraball feet will accomplish just that at €330 for a set of four. Stillpoints Ultra SS v2 would be a (significantly) more expensive alternative. But if you want to gain the sonic benefits and clarity of the Ceraballs, but with an enhanced sense of instrumental colour and musical shape and flow, then I’d recommend either the Arya Audio RevOpods (£960 or $1,495/4 and widely used by Wadax owners under Reference components) or the solution I finally settled on, a quartet of Acouplex cones (£530/4 including M6 adaptors in PEEK). Alternatively, you might opt for the Arya Audio RevOpod Minis at £280 or $300/4 plus adaptors, as a more cost effective option, albeit one that I haven’t tried. Just bear in mind that the US prices are plus local sales tax.
The Studio Player may not be as big as the Reference DAC or Server, but it’s still big. At 480mm wide, 340mm deep and around 220mm tall (depending on the feet you end up using) you need to make sure your rack is going to accept it. Width and depth shouldn’t be a problem: height might be… With the Player positioned properly atop your chosen feet – with the outputs properly handed (they’re arranged left and right as seen from the front – reversed when viewed from the rear) what else do you need to know. Well, running in is going to mean leaving the player on repeat or streaming: neither is quite as straightforward as it seems…
Unlike the Reference Server, the Studio Player is not (yet) a Roon end-point: the unit is currently undergoing Roon certification. Once that happens – which should be shortly – you’ll be able to run the unit with Roon-based servers, but until then, you’ll have to get used to alternative streaming interfaces. Currently, Wadax are recommending Tidal, Audirvana and Spotify – the latter for the universal access it offers to non-audiophile family members. As a uPNP renderer, the Studio Player is currently compatible with any uPNP device/server or control system. That means that for anybody running a uPNP eco-system, the Studio Player is literally plug-n-play. Once certified (probably by early next year, 2025) Players will auto-update for full Roon compatibility and control, along with the promised control options from the likes of Qobuz, as those become available, thus delivering on the Studio Player’s promise of versatility, performance and access.
The disc transport is controlled from the front-panel touch-screen or the remote. The touch screen itself works really well – far better than the earlier iterations first seen when the Atlantis series launched. However, it still carries some echoes of its past, which introduces a few operational anomalies. The top-loading Atlantis transport used an up-arrow to open the transport cover. That same up-arrow makes slightly less sense used to open a sliding drawer – but it’s easy enough to get your head around. Less intuitive is the repeat function. Despite the plethora of buttons on the remote, you’ll not find it there. Instead, an upward pointing V on the touch screen, positioned centrally above the main transport functions, drags up a menu from the bottom of the window, one that adds fast-forward/reverse and the repeat function. Touch the rectangular repeat symbol once to repeat a track, twice to repeat the disc and again to cancel. When running in, it’s also worth mixing up CD and SACD discs, to exercise both reading chains, although the SACD data-stream is synchronously converted to PCM in order to pass through the MusIC process and decoding.
