As I said, the QX-5 Twenty isn't bad in any way; it's just to my ears and in my system the Wadia S7i is much better, at least for Red Book and sources that are 96/24 or less.
The example, once again, was in the jingle bells on God Only Knows; on the Ayre I could pick out the balls inside the jingle bells as they were shaken, where it was harder to pick them out on the Wadia, but the Wadia presented the studio in which they were recorded, where the Ayre made them sound like they were recorded in a dead sound booth and just panned into a space on the mixing console.
It was the same for a few other recordings I heard, where it sounded like each element was recorded in a dead space and just placed into place where through the Wadia the performers were in a studio.
My preference is to hear the palpable sense of space rather than the details of the balls in the bells, but for others the converse may be true, which is why I didn't state it as good or bad, just different.
Last edited by BillK; 08-10-2018 at 04:37 AM.
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