[ Home TNT-Audio | Staff & Contacts | HiFi Playground | Listening tests | DIY & Tweakings | Music & Books ]

A New Sheriff in Town

The Parks Waxwing Phono DSP as a Tool for the 78 Collector

[Italian Version Here]

Product name: Parks Audio Waxwing
Manufacturer: Parks Audio - USA
Cost: $499 (Currency conversion)
Reviewer: David Hoehl - TNT-Audio USA
Reviewed: September, 2025

[Parks Waxwing Phono DSP]

For nearly 15 years now, my phono preamp for electrically recorded 78s and all LPs has been a Graham Slee Jazz Club. Throughout that time, I've considered it one of the two best audio purchases I ever made; the other, for reasons I outlined in a review here, is my default preamp for acoustic records, the Graham Slee Accession, which made its first appearance in my system about 8 years after the Jazz Club. Even when I bought my Jazz Club, it wasn't a new model, and, zooming out to the audio market generally, throughout the intervening years it and its upscale stablemate/successor the Graham Slee Revelation have reigned as the only mainstream options in current production suitable for modern stereo LPs while offering selectable EQ choices for playing electrical 78s and early LPs from the days before RIAA became standard.[1]

A lifespan on the market exceeding 15 years is a testament to the Jazz Club's fundamentally sound design and sterling performance. Nonetheless, fifteen years is a long time for an audio component to remain on the market without modification, and eventually something else is bound to come along. Sure enough, something else now has come along, presenting the collector of vintage recordings with a choice. It's the Waxwing Phono DSP from Parks Audio, a small US manufacturer with a penchant for avian product names; the Waxwing's predecessors were the Parks Audio Budgie and then the Puffin. Outside, as you can see from the header photo, the Waxwing is an unassuming, featureless little black box, roughly 4 inches square by an inch and a quarter tall with rubber bumpers at either end doing service as supports and no mechanical controls - no knobs, no sliders, no switches. Inside, though, it offers an amazing degree of flexibility.

Bird of a Distinctly Different Feather

You'll note that the Waxwing is billed as a “phono DSP.” As such, it differs markedly from a traditional phono preamp like the Jazz Club. Specifically, the Waxwing digitizes the analogue signal fed into it; from there, everything is done by digital processing controlled via a Bluetooth application downloaded to the user's Apple or Android smartphone. Input is through standard RCA jacks on the back. Output can be analogue by RCA jacks or digital by either coax or optical jacks. Rounding out the back-panel complement is a stout ground post. In between input and output, the Waxwing can perform a multitude of functions beyond applying an EQ curve to the signal from a phono cartridge. Some of those functions are of use primarily or exclusively to the LP collector, and I will leave discussion of them to the plentiful other reviews this component has received on the Internet. This review will focus on aspects of the Waxwing that are useful, or potentially useful, to the collector of pre-LP recordings.

Given my generally jaundiced view of everything smartphone, I had my doubts about whether I would like the on-phone control system. In the event, however, I quickly came to the conclusion that I do. The settings are well arranged and easy to adjust, and having the phone as a remote means I can sit in my regular listening chair to manipulate them and assess their effects. That's actually a real boon for my setup, in which the playback gear inhabits an alcove off the side of the listening area, not in direct line with the speakers--no more “make an adjustment, step out into the room to listen to it on axis, hop back to the system, lather, rinse, repeat.” Moreover, tapping the title for any option calls up the relevant portion of the owner's manual, right on the phone's screen, to explain how it works, a nice touch. Without further ado, then, “picture is worth a thousand words” style, here are the control options and information displays in the Waxwing's phone application, shown in the order in which they appear as the user scrolls down the screen:[2]

[Waxwing controls]

So which of these settings will likely be of special use to the 78 collector? Here's my take:

  • Treble and Bass. These are like conventional treble and bass knobs on a typical preamp, helpful for casual adjustments.

  • Lo. This is a high-pass filter that defaults to 25 Hz but has settings from 0 to 48 KHz. I've found it particularly handy for acoustic Pathe discs. They have little or no musical content below around 100 Hz, and Pathe's recording process, which involved dubbing everything from session recordings cut on massive cylinders, sometimes introduced a tremendous amount of rumble; setting the Lo filter for 100 or 200 can largely eliminate it without appreciably affecting the musical signal.

  • Mode. The options for this tremendously useful tool are stereo, mono, super mono, mono left, and mono right. I'll have more to say about it below.

  • PEQ. A single-band parametric equalizer. Handy for addressing narrow notch frequencies, such as for horn resonances.

  • Phase. Options are Normal, Invert, Mixed, and Null. For lateral recordings, ordinarily Normal will be the setting of choice, but Null opens the door to playing vertical cut records without rewiring a cartridge. Again, I'll have more to say about this below.

  • EQ. In addition to RIAA (“Phono”) and a few other curves specific to LPs, choices pertinent to 78s are Line In; CCIR 78; Columbia 78; Blm300 78; Eur500 78; Eur250 78; and user-adjustable bass turnover frequency, bass shelf, and treble cut. A graph plotting the various preset curves can be seen here. The user adjustments allow for a dozen bass turnover settings from 0 to 1000 and 20 treble rolloff settings from 0 to 18. By comparison, the Graham Slee components have only 3 turnover settings (250, 375, and 500) and 4 rolloff settings (5, 11, 13.7, and 16). I've usually found those good enough, but there have been times when I felt the need for more, and the Waxwing delivers precisely that. For example, one reference table recommends playing electrical Edison recordings with bass turnover of 800 and treble rolloff of 16, and my ear confirms it's not far off for the ones I tested. Those settings are possible with the Waxwing but outside the Jazz Club's bass turnover range. Electrical Edisons are admittedly scarce to rare records, but when you need the settings, you need the settings.

  • File. In addition to several stock presets, this option enables the user to enter settings into memory for one-touch recall later.

  • Test. This option opens up a submenu containing, among other options of less interest for 78s, a provision specific to 78s that analyzes clicks in a record's leadout groove to determine the speed at which a turntable is spinning and display it in RPM. When I first read of it, I thought this capability promised to be quite useful, but in practice I find its utility limited. First, it takes a snapshot of a single speed rather than displaying the amount of change continuously as one adjusts a pitch control. Hence, one must repeatedly take single readings if, say, adjusting from 80 RPM (outside-start Pathe) to 90 RPM (center-start Pathe). Second, when I applied it to a few Pathe 78s, although in some cases it gave accurate results, in others it was wildly off (for whatever reason, best with 80 RPM outside start, poor with 90 RPM center-start). The Parks documentation recommends always reading from an LP or 45, even when setting speed for a 78, but in that case a handheld digital tachometer is actually easier.

    • A la Mode

    The Waxwing's feature that first caught my attention was “super mono,” accessible through the Mode menu. For years, I've read that playback of mono records generally, and 78 RPM records in particular, can be improved by reproducing them in stereo and switching between channels to select the quieter groove wall. OK, that's nice in theory, but how is one to accomplish this feat in practice with conventional analogue gear, at least at the consumer level? As a digital component, the Waxwing finally gives us a practical solution. In “super mono” mode, it samples and compares the two walls hundreds of times per second, opting for the quieter choice in each instance. Mission accomplished, as they say? Well, not so fast. Having experimented with it a bit, I find that super mono can improve playback results, but in general the improvement is quite modest, not the night-and-day difference advocates of groove wall selection have long implied. Worth having, then, but not necessarily a compelling reason to buy a Waxwing.

    For that matter, super mono can actually be counterproductive. Applied to a stereo-era LP transfer from 78s, super mono (in conjunction with a noise reduction option called “magic”) yielded sound that was full of digital artifacts/distortions. I tried again with the Waxwing set for plain ol' mono and it did fine. Working theory: the "super mono" groove side selector works well with actual mono, i.e. lateral cut, but not necessarily with mono recordings, even antique ones, rendered with a modern stereo 45-45 groove cut.

    To my surprise, the “mode” selection that did make a really dramatic difference for certain records is a throwback to mainstream components of long ago: a selector for a mono signal derived from just the left or just the right channel. My very first stereo receiver, an old Kenwood KR-77 of late 1960s vintage that I bought as an impoverished college student around 1980, had that functionality--albeit in its tape monitor, not its phono section--and I think any number of components of its vintage did likewise, but it's been at best a rarity in more modern gear. Fast forward to today and the Waxwing. Among my favorite recordings from the 1930s is Serge Koussevitzky's leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Haydn's Symphony no. 102, issued in the United States as Victor set M 529, but my copy has always sounded a little fuzzy no matter what stylus I applied to it. Experimenting with the Waxwing, I found that super mono didn't do much to clean up the sound, but selecting right-channel-only mono definitely did--all, or nearly all, the fuzzies seem to have been confined to the left channel. With right only, playback was about as clean as one can ask from 1930s 78s. Later, I tried Victor set 237, Piero Coppola leading the Paris Conservatory Orchestra in Schumann's Third Symphony. Here, super mono yielded very nice results, quiet and clean, except for the “cathedral” movement, which was noticeably noisier and had some distortion. After some experimentation, I found that going to mono, right channel only cleaned up that side's distortion, although, not surprisingly, it did nothing to diminish the noise. Again, working theory: uneven groove damage from playback early in the set's life with steel or other damaging needles on a turntable with no antiskate compensation.

    Phaser on stun

    The “phase” control offers four settings, one of which merits further discussion. “Null” is a wonderful feature for those who collect vertical cut disks. Those unfamiliar with vertical vs. lateral cut and wishing to explore the subject in some depth can peruse an article I wrote for TNT several years ago, but in a nutshell, during the acoustic era and just shading into the electrical era, most records were cut with a groove that modulated from side to side (“lateral cut”), but certain manufacturers employed a groove that modulated up and down (“vertical cut”, a.k.a. “hill-and-dale”). Lateral cut is what we today call “mono,” although both types were monaural recordings. The primary exponents of vertical cut grooves on disks were Edison and the French recording giant Pathe Freres; each required a special, incompatible jeweled stylus for its records, diamond for Edison and sapphire for Pathe. Some other companies that adopted vertical cut for more or less time either copied the Pathe groove profile or relied on the same single-use steel needles that were universal for lateral cut records. Thus, vertical cut records profit from having styli in a variety of sizes available, just as lateral cut records do.

    Playing a lateral cut record in “mono” eliminates the vertical component of a stereo signal and with it a significant amount of surface noise. Playing a vertical cut record in this way, however, will cut out the musical signal and yield nothing but surface noise. The usual way of solving this dilemma is to have a second cartridge miswired by reversing one channel's hot and ground leads; selecting “mono” then will yield a vertical cut signal. The Waxwing's Null setting achieves the same result without rewiring. Thus, it's a boon for those of us who have a single cartridge for all records, LP and 78 alike, and it simplifies swapping out styli to account for the different Edison, Pathe, and needle cut grooves for those of us who have a collection of various stylus sizes and like to keep each different stylus mounted to its own separate cartridge in a dedicated headshell.

    Flocking together

    As you'll have gathered by now, I think the Waxwing steals much of the Graham Slee Jazz Club's thunder for electrically recorded disks. It does not, however, in any way displace the Graham Slee Accession for acoustic records, those recorded by the original horn-and-diaphragm mechanical method. As I discussed at length in my review cited above, I consider the Accession the preamp of choice for such records, as it includes a “true flat” setting that uniquely compensates for magnetic cartridges' rising output with frequency. On the other hand, with only limited, LP-oriented preset EQ curves, it is not the best choice for electrically recorded 78s. At the time, I remarked, “Dare we hope for something like a 'Jazz-cession' some day, a preamp incorporating both the Accession's 'true flat' for acoustic disks and the Jazz Club's flexibility for electrical ones? That would be a dream solution for records of every era.” Nothing of the sort has been forthcoming from Graham Slee, but with a little tinkering one can combine a Waxwing and an Accession to achieve something like that result. My approach is to connect everything through a patch bay, shown here set up for vertical cut acoustic disks, the most involved iteration. Not shown, a jumper may be needed interconnecting the Waxwing's and Accession's ground posts and the turntable's ground lead to eliminate a very faint level of hum. I found one necessary with a “vintage” Fons turntable but not with a current production Reloop. (Teaser: a review of the latter will be forthcoming in due course.) And, yes, to admit the obvious, my system is set up for function, not to be “pretty.”

    [Patch bay for combining Accession and Waxwing]

    Flowing from right to left--I'm ever the contrarian!--the turntable output first goes to the Accession, which applies the true flat equalization. From there it passes to the Waxwing, which applies Null phase to yield vertical cut mono. From there, it passes on to the amplifier. Two important adjustments, working in harmony, are (1) to dial down the Accession's output very low to avoid overloading the Waxwing's inputs and (2) to set the Waxwing's EQ to “line in” to defeat any EQ--but not that useful Lo filter--at the Waxwing, leaving the Accession's true flat offsetting cartridge effects as the sole equalization applied. The “line in” setting is what makes this arrangement possible, and its absence in the Jazz Club is why nothing of the sort could be done before.

    Playback of other record types is simpler. For lateral acoustic recordings, the turntable output goes to the Accession set for true flat, and the Accession's output goes directly to the amplifier. Its output should be set suitably high, and the Waxwing is cut out of the chain entirely. For electrical 78s, the Accession is cut out of the chain entirely, with the turntable output going directly to the Waxwing and thence to the amplifier. In this case, the Waxwing's phase setting will be “normal” for lateral cut records and “Null” in those rare cases, primarily a few transitional Pathes and the very late Edisons diamond discs, in which an electrical record is vertical cut; its mode will be one of the variants of mono; and its EQ will be one of the 78 presets or a custom setting created by the user. For LPs, the user can choose either the Accession or the Waxwing, cutting the other out of the chain; the Waxwing may be a better choice for early LPs, given its wider array of LP-specific EQ curve choices, but of course EQ is no basis on which to choose for those after universal adoption of the RIAA curve.

    Conclusion

    The Parks Waxwing offers tremendous flexibility to those who need it for playing early electrical records. Briefly acknowledging the proverbial elephant in the room, however, it must be said that the Waxwing will not appeal to those allergic to solid state generally or digital technology in particular. It will probably be anathema to those for whom only vacuum tubes will do. Indeed, when the Waxwing was announced, I saw numerous discussion forum postings in which former adherents of the tube-type Budgie cried fowl--er, foul--in terms that can only be described as accusations of betrayal. Well, for the vacuum tube contingent, I suppose the sole solution is resort to the vintage equipment market; the Waxwing does have a setting in its “FX” menu that claims to emulate tube sound, but somehow I doubt that's going to win over many true believers. For the digiphobes who nonetheless accept solid state, I would continue to recommend the Graham Slee Jazz Club and Revelation, which, if not as versatile as the Waxwing, still cover the basics with assurance and remain the same superb, time-tested components they always have been. As to acoustical recordings, in my opinion the Graham Slee Accession remains the only game in town.

    For those who are willing to try a new way of playing vintage electrical recordings, on the other hand, the Waxwing offers, for about half the price of a Jazz Club or Revelation,[3] versatility far beyond what has been readily available to the private collector. I've been impressed with the thought that has gone into its design and the thorough way in which it meets vintage records' multifarious demands. In particular, bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of them are acoustic recordings, the Null phase setting is a big help for vertical cut records, and the Waxwing's provision of unequalized line signals facilitates its combination with other supplementary preamps as needed. The ready ability to derive a mono signal from one channel is a valuable addition to our 78 RPM playback toolbox, be it for acoustic or electrical records. For the latter, the range of customizable EQ curves is ample. Equipment aimed at the general audiophile market rarely pays even lip service to old records' issues, but Parks has pretty much nailed them to a degree that I doubt we'll see bettered anytime soon, if ever, in a component aimed at the general audio market. With a fond, sentimental look back to the Jazz Club that has served me so well for so long, then, a strong recommendation for the Waxwing from this antiquarian writer.

    ___________________

    [1] - Aside from the Jazz Club and Revelation, other devices for equalizing vintage records have come and gone during the period, but they have tended to be either much more expensive archival specialist products without general distribution, quite likely mono only, or else tack-ons at the hobbyist level. One well-known example of the latter applies additional equalization to the RIAA output of a conventional phono preamp, a workable but hardly “audiophile” solution. Nothing else has ever replicated what the Accession can do for acoustic recordings.

    [2] - Update: In the interim between when I wrote this article and its publication, during which TNT-Audio took its annual summer break, Parks released beta versions of updated Apple and Android control applications. The most recent summary of revisions, generally extensions and bug fixes for existing features but some specifically pertinent to 78 RPM collectors, can be seen here.

    [3] - The effect of US tariffs on this calculation remains to be seen. The Waxwing is built in the United States, but the extent to which they will increase the cost of its constituent components is unknown to me. As of this writing, the Waxwing's price remains the same as I paid a few months ago. For US readers, the Graham Slee products will doubtless take a tariff hit, as they are made in England. Small companies like Parks and Graham Slee usually can't afford to absorb artificially imposed costs of this sort; I would expect price increases to be forthcoming and act sooner rather than later if interested in the Waxwing, a Graham Slee component, or both.

    Did you enjoy this article? You can support our free, advertising-free magazine with a small Paypal donation using the button below. Thank you![Love]

    [Donate with Paypal!]

    DISCLAIMER. TNT-Audio is neither a shop, nor a HiFi company or a repair laboratory for HiFi components. We don't sell anything. It is a 100% independent magazine that neither accepts advertising from companies nor requires readers to register or pay for subscriptions. If you wish, you can support our independent reviews via a PayPal donation. After publication of reviews, the authors do not retain samples other than on long-term loan for further evaluation or comparison with later-received gear. Hence, all contents are written free of any “editorial” or “advertising” influence, and all reviews in this publication, positive or negative, reflect the independent opinions of their respective authors. TNT-Audio will publish all manufacturer responses, subject to the reviewer's right to reply in turn.

    [Follow us on Facebook]

    © Copyright 2025 David Hoehl - drh@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

    [ Home TNT-Audio | Staff & Contacts | HiFi Playground | Listening tests | DIY & Tweakings | Music & Books ]