Evgeny Kissin: Beethoven, Appassionata Sonata. A piano is merciless. It's where truth tends to escape. Give it too much transient emphasis and the hammers become little ballistic weapons. Give it too much warmth and the instrument turns into a mahogany sofa. Dry up the harmonics and you get a toy piano. Fatten them up and the Flight of the Bumblebee turns into a march of elephants. Flatten the dynamics and Beethoven becomes a series of increasingly emphatic keyboard gestures rather than an argument between violence and restraint. X2 gets unusually close to what I hear in concerts when I chance upon seats in the first 3-4 rows. The attack is immediate but doesn't detach from the body of the note. The soundboard seems to continue resonating beneath the hammer impact rather than disappear behind it. Yet it never overwhelms. This is one of the first places where comparing Tambaqui becomes revealing. Tambaqui is arguably the more explicit. It can make me hear the precise geometry of an attack, the differentiation between notes, the tiny changes in intensity that separate one phrase from the next. X2 gives me less sensation of examining those things. Instead I become more aware of the pianist. That sounds romantic but isn't intended to be. It is simply a different distribution of attention. With Tambaqui I hear how the recording contains the piano. With X2 I spend more time listening to what the pianist does with it. That distinction is initially small. But when the intensity of review listening fades away, it gains extra meaning, giving me a bit more of what I crave.

Keith Jarrett: The Köln Concert. Here X2 encounters one of the most famous imperfect recordings of the audiophile canon: an extraordinary performance captured on an instrument brazenly problematic. This is exactly the kind of recording on which a good digital source should not attempt to rewrite history. And X2 doesn't. There are moments when the piano is hard, moments when its upper register sounds slightly brittle, moments when spatial information becomes more suggestion than architecture. Here Tambaqui is magnificent precisely because it refuses to hide these things. X2 doesn't hide them either but its more continuous rendering makes the imperfections less intrusive. The roughness belongs to the event rather than appearing as a defect pasted onto it. X2 isn't kinder to recordings, simply less inclined to make their flaws the centre of attention.

Rebecca Pidgeon: "Spanish Harlem". Audiophilia has abused this cut almost as thoroughly as "Hotel California" and I'm guilty as charged. Yet its usefulness survives. The voice is intimate without being claustrophobic. The bass has genuine wooden presence. The production gives a good system plenty of opportunities to make itself sound clever. X2 accepts the invitation. Rebecca's voice has density rather than mere focus. The double bass develops a physical centre. Small ambient details become part of the acoustic rather than little audiophile insects buzzing around its perimeter. With U2/Tambaqui I hear more explicit separation. Tambaqui draws beautifully clean borders around the performers. X2 gives them more connective tissue. That difference is subtle. Both front ends sound far more alike than not but with X2 the bass doesn't simply accompany the voice; it seems to inhabit the same acoustic. The reverberation doesn't sit behind the singer like scenery. It shapes the room. Both remain extraordinarily convincing but U2/Tambaqui more in a way which audiophiles revere, X2 like a musician might favour if we're mindful that these are nuances around the centre point of a continuum, not something to start a new religious war over.

Anette Askvik: "Liberty". If "Spanish Harlem" tests corporeality, "Liberty" tests darkness. Anette's voice hangs inside a vast acoustic field surrounded by bass energy and carefully controlled reverberation. X2 makes the space feel deep and wide. Large soundstages are easy to manufacture. Layered depth is far harder. With Tambaqui I can map the space more precisely. Individual layers resolve superbly, distances seem almost physically measurable. X2 doesn't resolve quite the same level of  information. Its imaging is a bit denser, tighter. A bit less light shines through, a bit less air swirls around the singer. The difference reminds me of looking at a landscape through a high-resolution 3D headset versus standing in that landscape at sunset. When it comes to visual cues, Tambaqui still has an edge that few DACs surpass.

Ella Fitzgerald:"Mack the Knife". Now X2 has nowhere to hide. Live Ella is a hurricane disguised as a woman. The applause, audience, microphone, orchestra, her timing and sudden changes in vocal intensity all create an extraordinarily complicated acoustic event that can easily overwhelm lesser gear but X2 keeps its composure. Applause doesn't become a wash of undifferentiated noise. The orchestra doesn't collapse behind the voice. Ella's phrasing remains conversational even when she does technical things to the melody that probably require a permit. Tambaqui gives me slightly more microscopic information. X2 gifts the performance with greater internal cohesion. The distinction isn't resolution versus softness. Both resolve. The shift is around what first grabs our attention. With Tambaqui I notice the individual pieces more readily. With X2 I more readily immerse in the whole.

Frank Sinatra: Ring-A-Ding-Ding! This recording finally stopped my notetaking and affirmed the image X2 had been progressively building in my mind. Sinatra didn't sound like a vocalist placed in front of an orchestra anymore. He was the reason the orchestra was there. X2 gives his voice weight without turning syrupy. Brass retains bite. Strings remain silky without becoming upholstered. The rhythm section has that peculiar combination of looseness and authority that great Swing thrives on. Then I went back to U2/Tambaqui and Tambaqui's extraordinary transparency again showed more explicit spatial information, separation and tiny cues that allow the venue to materialize. But Sinatra himself? I preferred X2. The man himself had a bit more life, a bit more presence.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: Schubert, Erlkönig. This is one recording where I expected Tambaqui to win. Which it did. Its combination of honesty and resolution remains formidable. The voice is enormous, sharply differentiated and physically present. Every change in articulation arrives with extraordinary clarity. Fischer-Dieskau's terror becomes more convincing. It's almost as if the tables turned compared to previous tracks but the extreme resolution Tambaqui is capable of is ultimately key to conveying the baritone's brilliance. I think X2 came just short of creating the sense of proximity that U2/Tambaqui threw in my face. This recording should be listened to on the edge of our seat, fine-tuned ear-to-speaker distance be damned. Here it's irrelevant. Your heart should simply beat faster with anxiety as Death comes closer. With X2, Death is just a bit too friendly.

Dave Brubeck Quartet: "Take Five". This is where X2's rhythmic behaviour becomes impossible to ignore. Joe Morello's cymbals are beautifully textured. Paul Desmond's saxophone hangs precisely in space. The bass has enough articulation to make every rhythmic relationship intelligible. Tambaqui too is phenomenal here, its separation surgical without becoming clinical. Yet X2 gives the quartet a slightly stronger sense of collective intent, not despite its less chiselled imaging but thanks to it. The images become less important than the interactions between musicians. Morello isn't hitting a cymbal in one location while Desmond blows a saxophone in another. Four musicians are playing Take Five—together.