Just a quick update:
I've just had a few days living with my dealer's latest copy of the QX-5 Twenty, which while not the same unit I auditioned
almost two years ago now, it does have several hundred hours' use on it.
What I found is… one issue was exactly what it was then and one is not.
I had complained of an HF sizzle and that "the best way to explain this is that the QX-5 Twenty gave vocalists who normally have no lisp or other accentuation of "S" sounds a bit of one."
That effect is
totally ameliorated with long-term break-in, and I was quite pleased to hear that.
Unfortunately, the other issue I described, a general reduction in soundstage width, appears to be a natural part of the unit along with the loss of a bit of sense of space.
A perfect example is the stereo version of the Beach Boys'
God Only Knows, sourced from the red book CD layer of the Analogue Productions SACD of
Pet Sounds (Analogue Productions CAPP 067 SA.)
At the beginning of the track there are sleigh bells that are being shaken.
Through the QX-5 Twenty, you can actually hear the ball that rolls around inside the sleigh bells to make them ring. It's truly incredible, and is something I do not hear as readily on my reference, my Wadia S7i.
However… through the Wadia there is a palpable sense of space heard in the sleigh bells, a bit of resonance that makes them sound as if they are being played in an actual
space. Through the QX-5 Twenty, they sound more like they are digital sleigh bells, generated in a plug-in and just "punched in." The sense of space surrounding them is totally missing.
As I said in another review, another effect I hear on several tracks is that instruments seem confined to the width of the speakers through the QX-5 Twenty. Through the Wadia, the space expands and several instruments appear to originate from beyond the left and right edges of my speakers.
On another track, what I heard was that the vocalist was perfectly centered, perfectly rendered and accurate, never bright, but once again "space" seemed missing, as if they were recorded in a modern sound booth and simply punched into place in the recording rather than recorded within an actual studio space. That would be exactly right for most modern recordings, but this was Frank Sinatra singing
Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words) sourced from the huge Reprise
The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings collection (Reprise 47045-2, disc 8 of 20) on which Frank
was recorded in a studio space.
Now, the biggest caveat is, like last time, I only have red book CDs and digital files in 16/44.1 and 16/48 formats, with only a handful of highres files in 24/96 or 24/192, my only interface from my computer to the Wadia or QX-5 Twenty is USB, and the only interface from another digital source I have is 16/48 S/PDIF via coax. I heard that same soundstage width effect on tracks played via all those sources using those connection methods.
Several reviews have mentioned that the QX-5 Twenty sounds better via its Ethernet port than via USB, but I don't own any streaming hardware or NAS devices so I can't audition the Ayre that way.
So in summary, for Redbook and 16/44.1 and 16/48 material delivered via USB or S/PDIF, the QX-5 Twenty still falls short (to me) as compared to my Wadia S7i.
Now the effects I am hearing from my Wadia may well be completely artificial; the sound reproduced from the QX-5 Twenty may in fact be more accurate and I may have just come to prefer an artificial Wadia "bloom" if one is being generated, much the way some prefer some tube gear that generates a "bloom" to other tube gear or solid state for the same reason.
I just wanted to relay that two years later, one of the effects I heard was apparently completely eliminated by component burn-in, but one appears to simply be a characteristic of the unit, whether good or bad.
That having been said, I would certainly purchase one and rave about its performance…
if I didn't have the Wadia S7i handy against which to make an immediate comparison and/or if streaming made up a majority of my listening.
But I
do have an S7i and
don't stream.
Obligatory controversial statement: I also don't have any MQA tracks, which the Wadia will never decode in any way, where if it hasn't already been made available I understand the QX-5 Twenty will decode MQA soon.
The Wadia obviously also isn't Roon compliant.