Kuzma Stabi XL Turntable/ Air Line Arm, Walker Proscenium Black Diamond Record Player

Kuzma vs. Walker: The Title Bout in Analog Playback

What the Walker’s bloom, space, size, air, neutrality, solidity, dimensionality, and dynamic authority buy you, musically, in Quasi una sonata, is not just more lifelike timbres, but a keener sense of how each instrument’s timbre both separates it from and, on occasion, joins it to the other instrument. You hear that pedaled G-minor chord of the piano, for instance, and the answering atonal shriek of the violin, and because of the realism with which the timbres of each instrument are stated and sustained, you suddenly realize that a musical offer has been made and musically answered—that the piano and violin (and the musics each represent) aren’t just insisting on their own separate identities but are also attempting to share some of the same harmonic ground. You also realize—once again because of the truthfulness with which their tone colors are stated and sustained—that this will never quite come to pass, because all they don’t share is also more clearly audible.

Most of all, what you get with the Walker— and what sets it apart from any other source component I’ve auditioned—is a “fool-you” sense that you’re hearing actual instruments there in the room with you. Whether it is Kremer’s violin or Gavrillov’s piano, or the coterie of string, wind, and percussion instruments in the Maxwell Davies mass, or Joan Baez singing “Gospel Ship” in Carnegie Hall, or the London Symphony Orchestra summoning up the Roman legions in Repsighi’s Pines of Rome, the Walker Proscenium Black Diamond comes closer to sounding “real” more often than any other source I’ve heard in my system. (Just for the record, the Kuzma comes in second.)

If the differences between these two record players seem familiar to you, it is because they are familiar. If I weren’t talking about record players, you might think I was talking about great solid-state amplification and great tube amplification. Like great solid-state, the Kuzma is a bit higher in low-level resolution, more extended and incisive at the extremes, gorgeous but darkish in tone color, and outright superior on transients, pace, and big dynamic swings. If fidelity were simply a matter of extraordinary detail (particularly performance-related detail) presented with extraordinary beauty and clarity (and, in the case, of transients, extraordinary realism)—and I concede that for a number of you it might well be—the Kuzma would be the winner of this shootout. But if the “gestalt” of a live concert or recital—the lifelike presence of instruments, their colors, their dynamics, and the space they play in—is what fidelity means (and I believe that it is), then the Walker wins handily. Like the best contemporary tubes, it is fuller and more realistic in tone color; bigger, bloomier, airier, and more three-dimensional in imaging; wider, deeper, more layered in soundstaging; and a bit more authoritative dynamically. If the Kuzma gets the small parts closer to right, the Walker gets the wholes closer to right.

Understand that neither of these great record players is a “loser.” I switch back and forth between them fairly often and, if push came to shove, could live with either. For much less money, the Kuzma is a no-brainer recommendation—and would undoubtedly be the best tangential-tracking record player money could buy, were the Walker Proscenium Black Diamond not available. But, of course, the Walker is available. It’ll cost you more and, though gorgeous, won’t be quite as sexy to look at or play with, but if you have the dough, are married to LPs, and are into symphonic or folk or chamber or jazz you simply can’t find a better source component for any amount of money. Sonically, the Kuzma may come a bit closer to the best hi-fi, but the Walker comes closer to the absolute sound. TAS