The settings ‘cog’ on the display also gives you access to various other, system dependant set up parameters. These include output level (1V, 2V, 4V or variable), size of the volume steps in variable mode, output impedance (15 values between 0Ω and 600Ω) absolute phase, clock priority (internal or external) and the selected disc layer on hybrid discs. Those related to level and impedance are particularly significant if you intend to use the Player as a control unit, directly connected to a power amp. For the purposes of this initial listen, I stuck with the unit in fixed mode.
How does it sound?
First impressions of the Studio Player suggest it’s going to more than live up to the hype. Like every Wadax product before it, its musical presentation is built on the same temporal and spatial security and coherence that invests recorded music with a sense of natural life, perspective and proportion. This is where getting things just so with levelling and support really pays off. If you want to demonstrate/experience the musical impact, just insert a couple of business cards under the feet on one side of the player. The collapse in the sense of space, colour and palpable musical presence is shocking, the undermining of musical flow and expressive range reduces the sound way closer to (although not quite to the depths of) the digital mediocrity represented by so many of the Studio Player’s price peers. It underlines just how wide a yawning musical gulf exists between this machine and anything else out there that can match its functionality at anywhere near its price.
There are those who will tell you that the Wadax is just one of the various, different digital ‘flavours’ available. In one sense that’s true: the alternatives are, after all, indisputably digital. But re-cast that proposition in musical terms and the more you examine it, the more ludicrous it becomes. Just as the Reference components make their case on musical as opposed to sonic grounds, so does the Studio Player. The Wadax products have always built their performance on a fundamentally different foundation to other digital replay systems – and the Studio Player is cut from exactly the same cloth. It understands – or rather, allows you to understand – music in terms of shape and pattern: not just the pitch and amplitude of notes, but their placement, the space and relationship between them. You hear it in the easy clarity with which musical phrases emerge, the ease with which a performer’s technique and expressive intent are laid bare, the unforced sense of pace within the music, just as fast, or as slow, as the musicians make it. The sense of natural spatial organisation and dynamic coherence bring body, dimensionality and presence to the presentation of recorded music. The recognisable diction and character of familiar voices is uncanny, especially the range of vocal expression and emphasis.
But the acid test isn’t in listening to the Studio Player. It’s when you listen to what passes for the competition. In all but a very few cases, the same recordings suddenly sound bleached out and disjointed, two-dimensional and mechanical, devoid of life, interest or emotional connection. That ability to capture the note-to-note continuity within the music and between musical strands has simply collapsed. How does the Studio Player stack up against the Wadax Reference components – or the best of the rest? The Reference boxes are bigger and way weightier – and an awful lot of that is down to physical and electrical isolation: segmented chassis construction and massive, ultra-quiet power supplies. Those things take the performance of the Reference components to another level: more shape, presence, body, colour, greater musical purpose and intent. The Studio Player might lack the startling, ‘They are here’, almost physical presence that the Reference set-up brings to musical reproduction, but its performance is built on the same essential foundation, with the same structure and spatial/temporal organisation. The musculature might not be as well defined or as powerful, but it rests on the same DNA.
