The P10 moves record replay beyond hi-fi and into the realm of human communication, something that becomes even more apparent on voices. Our ears are so attuned to vocal nuance that the natural diction and expressive range, the micro-dynamics and details of speech and song revealed by the P10 seem almost ghostly on first listen. Whether it’s the slight husk and distinctive accent of Eleanor McEvoy’s voice, the intimacy and emotional intensity of Janis Ian or Steve Earle’s gravelly tones on Copperhead Road, the communicative power of the vocals is as clear as each singer is instantly recognisable. Voice really is the acid test and it’s a test that this phono-stage aces.
The P10’s presentation might not reach the point that can be described as life-like – but it is more ‘like life’ than any other phono-stage – and as a result, pretty much any other source – that I’ve heard. It’s ability to preserve both the information extracted by the cartridge and the pattern of that information, makes this the most natural record replay I’ve experienced: natural in the way that instruments and voices are presented, but more importantly, natural in the way that they combine. If the purpose of a hi-fi system is to bring you closer to the original musical event, then this is one giant leap for audio kind.
Onward and upward – P10 goes four-box…
For a fair few years, the four-box P1 was comfortably the most musically convincing phono-stage I’d ever used. It made sense of the music and it made sense of the upgrade path, an elegant if increasingly bulky route to vinyl nirvana. Yet the P10 has just bettered it – and not by a small or musically insignificant margin. Does that make the P10 the best phono-stage in the world? Not even close, because waiting in the wings is the option to add a second P10 and investigate THAT four-box solution! At this point, we are truly leaving the realms of the reasonable and abandoning cost considerations all together. Even though the P10 four-box comes in at rather less that twice the price of two P10s (you actually save $20,000, or the cost of two audio circuit boards) by now, things have become real simple, you either have the coin – or you don’t. – so I’m not even going to address the issue of price. What I am going to talk about is performance and what is possible…
Listening to the two-box P10 compared to its four-box iteration is a sobering experience: As astonishingly impressive as the two-box product is, for all the places it takes you that you’ve never been before in terms of musical and sonic reproduction, doubling up the box count removes yet another layer of expressive, spatial and dynamic constraint. If the P10 introduces you to the idea of frictionless transfer, of unimpeded musical projection, of natural pace and dynamic response, it takes the four-box to reveal the true implications and results of that reproductive revolution.
