Hello WADAX

exupgh12 said:
Listening Impressions After Three Weeks - What the SP does for me that others don't

The Studio Player, or should i say Wadax in general, does something different from every DAC that has passed through my system, and many others that i have listened to in other familiar or less familiar systems. It doesn't just present the recording. It presents the composition itself.

Most DACs I've listened to, with a handful of top-tier exceptions, make excellent music, but the gap between them and the analog experience remains wide. With analog, I get the natural flow of the notes and the exact space between them. With digital, even when the result is impressive, it tends to stay in a technical dimension and doesn't always pull you in. The Wadax manages to produce that same elusive organicity that turns a collection of instruments into a synchronized ensemble playing a live work.

Timing​

One of the most immediate differences shows up in timing. Not technical precision in the dry sense; my previous DAC was also precise. This is something else, deeper and more essential. It's the shift from hearing "well-produced instruments" to feeling a band playing together as a single entity.

The Jaco Pastorius album (Donna Lee, Come On, Come Over) is a great test for this. His virtuosic control of the fretless and the fusion of jazz and funk create an exceptional vibrancy. Through the Studio Player, his bass stops chasing the rhythm and becomes the anchor that leads it with confidence. You feel the rhythm section breathing inside the room.

That feeling intensifies on Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Give it Away). The chemistry between bass and drums is the beating heart of that record. In a system with phenomenal timing, the groove becomes uncompromising and locked in, to the point where the instruments merge into a single organic entity. You stop only hearing the bass lead melody and rhythm simultaneously and start feeling it as something physical, almost tangible.

With Marcus Miller on M2 (Power), the system is pushed to its limits, forced to handle a bass line that is both brutally powerful and precise as a Swiss watch. And yet, the Wadax rises to the challenge with astonishing ease. It preserves a sense of rhythmic coherence that feels almost unreal; the bass doesn’t just go deep, it tightens like a coiled spring, anchoring the entire ensemble with unwavering confidence.
At some point, something shifts. You stop hearing digital playback as a sequence of samples. Instead, the groove becomes tangible, almost physical - a driving force that propels the music forward, pulling you into its momentum.

Tonal Density​

After timing, tonal density. This is where the Studio Player reveals what it can actually do with color. It extracts the original timbre from inside the instruments themselves.

Bill Evans's piano on Everybody Digs Bill Evans sounds like a grand piano playing in a room, with the resonance of a real wooden body, not a high-resolution simulation of one.

On Avi Kaplan's The Summit (same track name), Kaplan's bass and baritone voice becomes the ultimate test of a system’s ability to convey human texture. The Wadax doesn’t just reproduce the low frequencies; it reaches deeper, uncovering the fine nuances of vocal cords in motion, the subtle friction between notes that gives a voice its soul. Then there is the space itself that comes alive. Each image is wrapped in a cushion of air that feels almost tangible, as if you could reach out and sense its presence. Kaplan’s voice doesn’t merely play in the room - it arrives. A human presence, organic and grounded, carrying real weight and density, standing there in space as something you don’t just hear, but experience.

That precision carries through to the horns. Sonny Rollins's saxophone on Way Out West, and the trumpets of Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, gain body and texture that makes them sound exactly as they should: alive, breathing, and rough in precisely the right measure. Even a bowed string, in this system, manages to convey the physical sensation of tightened gut on wood and lacquer.

Compared to Analog​

The analog comparison is, for me, a critical parameter. The Brinkmann/Madake/Edison combination is a reference through which I evaluate every digital source in the system. The short version: analog is still king, and it remained so even after many hours with the Reference in different systems.

That said, every DAC I've owned until now sounded unmistakably like a digital source, with no room for confusion. The Studio Player manages to close the gap precisely in the areas where digital tends to fail: building rich tonal body and rhythmic coherence.

It hasn't closed the gap completely. Vinyl has an organic quality, a kind of aliveness that's difficult to put into words; no digital source today can mimic. But this is the first time I've found myself reaching for the digital selector far more often than I expected to. When an audiophile who is deeply invested in analog starts choosing the other side of the switch at that frequency, it says something worth taking seriously.

Bottom Line​

The Studio Player makes me happy!

That it also makes DACs costing twice as much sound like products from a previous era is almost beside the point — a bonus on top of something more personal. It's the most significant digital step I've experienced since the Oladra joined the system, and I don't say that lightly.
Will I eventually add the dedicated PSU and clock? Time will tell. For now, what I can say is this: if you run a revealing system and musicality matters more to you than analytical performance, put it on your list. Just know what you're signing up for — a lot of sleepless nights you never planned on having.
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Great review and glad you are enjoying what I have been enjoying for a while now. Congrats on an awesome system.
 
I am running it directly in to my MSB S202. That’s because I did that when I owned the MSB Premier DAC.
 
I do not have a Studio Player; however, I would run it through my pre-amp if I did. I have more than digital as my source, and I have always felt that a good pre-amplifier is a benefit to a solid system. In my view it is one component that seems to get overlooked in the grand scheme of an audio system. I have read articles where the point was made that a pre-amplifier may be the most important component in a system.

A pre-amp deals with the most micro levels and is the very heart of a system. Even if it has multiple component functions, such as DAC, phono stage, etc., they are usually dealt and built as separate component with the convience of coming in a single unit. For example, the McIntosh comes with a built in DAC, which is modular. The DAC can be upgraded. Even though I do not use the built in DAC now, if an improved version is ever released I might.

For years (almost forever) they have come with built in phono stages. They currently offer external phono stages, but that is a more recent development. An engineer at McIntosh told me that the built-in phono stage is the exact same as the one they sell separately. Having owned both, I would tend to agree with him.

My point is the pre-amplifier is the heart of a system and source components are usually best to be considered separately. My T+A does have a volume control and could be used straight to an amplifier, but even if digital was my only source I would still believe that a pre-amp was imperative to my system.
 
My older system was Innuos Statement + MSB Premier + Constellation Pictor and Taurus + Kharma Exquisite After testing MSB Reference and S202 I traded the constellation set in and bought the MSB 202 because dollar for dollar the S202 gave me most improvement. But with Reference and Pictor it gave a bass that was really cool, but someone I discussed with said that’s is because Reference have I much higher output voltage than Premier.
 
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