Intro
Contents
Esoteric is one of those brands that simply needs no more introduction. This high-end branch of parent company TEAC still captures the imagination of many an enthusiast. And rightly so: the equipment they build, is simply beautiful. So you can understand why your author was delighted to welcome the Esoteric K-03XD SE SAC CD player to the listening room.
With an impressive 28 kilos of weight and a top-notch finish, this device breathes high-end. The price does too, by the way: 19,800 Euros.
The reason that this player is so incredibly heavy is simple: the double housing of very thick aluminum, dual power supplies (for analog and digital separately) and, for example, the extremely heavy VRDS drive (the new version of the VRDS-Atlas drive in the K-03XD SE, the Atlas 03)
A wonderful detail when you take this brute out of the box and place it in your furniture is the feet. These are not bolted to the chassis. The same goes for the top plate: it is ‘half fixed’, without screws. According to Esoteric, this sounds just a little better than screwing things on. Japanese perfection… we love it.
Esoteric VRDS-Atlas 03
Your author feels pretty old thinking back on his hi-fi journey. This journey really started around 1998 when he was 18 years old. Before that, some decent systems passed by. Think a Pioneer tower and a quadraphonic Marantz (yes… I had no idea then (I was 15 or so) that this would become an icon). But at 18, I had bought a Philips 900-series amplifier with some Chario speakers. And man: I was so happy with that! Then the real stuff came and the journey took off: a Van Medevoort preamplifier, Arcam power amplifier and …. a Van Medevoort CD222 with… Teac VRDS7 drive.
I have never forgotten that CD player: what a gem it was! And yes: that was partly due to that wonderful drive.
Esoteric has perfected the“Vibration-Free Rigid Disc-Clamping System” in detail over the past thirty years. It’s even stiffer, dampens even more resonances (thanks in part to a wider, lower design), which in turn results in an even more accurate reading of the 1’s and 0’s. Always good.
Power supply and dac
Another element Esoteric has addressed with the K-03XD SE version is the power supply. Analog and digital are completely separated. And the in-house developed discrete dac and output stage has also been further refined again compared to the non-SE version.
Speaking of their in-house dac, though, that’s an interesting story. First of all, the Esoteric K-03XD SE features three inputs: USB, coaxial and optical (unfortunately no bnc or AES). This is great, of course, because it allows you to connect multiple sources to this wonderful dac.
Then a word about the dac technology itself. With Esoteric’s Master Sound Discrete DAC, the signal path runs broadly as follows:
The incoming digital signal (PCM or DSD) is first completely decoupled by an isolation and buffer layer in the FPGA developed in-house. By the way, that is not where the conversion takes place. The FPGA is to re-clock the data and bring the jitter down some more. This “cleaned up signal” goes through another oversampling engine, where PCM is scaled extremely high (usually towards tens of MHz) using Esoterics proprietary ΔΣ algorithms. This is somewhat similar to Grimm’s way of doing things, but of course there are differences in exactly how they upsample.
This delta-sigma step is crucial: Esoteric converts PCM into a high-frequency 1-bit-like data signal, putting all noise outside the audible range (noise shaping). In short: this is not a classic R-2R DAC, but a kind of hybrid DAC in which delta-sigma is used before the discrete conversion layer.
By the way, DSD remains in principle DSD. So this does not first go to PCM to be processed again. That would also be somewhat nonsensical. It does get re-clocked and passed through Esoteric’s internal filter structure.
After the delta-sigma step follows the actual D/A conversion. And this is where it gets interesting, because Esoteric does not use a 1-bit converter like standard DAC chips, but a discrete multi-bit switching matrix. You can think of this as a multiple parallel DAC array that converts the modulated signal to analog via hundreds of discrete switches and resistors.
This is followed by full analog low-pass filtering and a discrete output stage, often in balanced configuration, with extremely short signal paths. Below is a schematic of this dac. As you can see, it is quite complex. But believe us: it sounds absolutely fantastic.
Sometimes I wonder if CD wasn’t just the superior medium.. I find the calmness that you kept mentioning in this review is hard to find with streaming. Now I don’t have a streaming setup of 20k€ but still. It is not the first time I read or hear this kind of feedback from CD listening.
This is a 20.000 Euro CD player 😉
You can get to a streaming solution which sounds great, but not with streaming services. I still don’t understand what is happening, but even on gear that is known to have been well-engineered, local files still beat the streaming service.
Local files playback can be as good as CD though, you don’t need 20.000 Euro for that. In comparison, a good CD transport is still cheaper to get to the same result.
Thank you Martijn that is interesting. I guess all the network involved in streaming is the problem. A problem that disappears with CD or local files (when on internal disk or usb stick). Indeed that is what I felt when you did the livestream with the CD transports. There seems to be exceptional sound for not too much money.
You wrote: “… No: this just plays exactly what’s on the record.”
Without wanting to take anything away from the Esoteric and your enjoyment of it, when I read statements like this, I just shake my head. Of course, in the pedestrian sense, it’s literally true. But in a more meaningful sense, I want to ask the writer, How could you know what’s on the record? Unless, of course, you were there for every step from recording to mixing to manufacture.
Why would you know what is on the record just because you where there “from the recording to mixing to manufacture”?
I think the best audiophile digital playback setups can dig out even more, that was captured by the mic, than what the studio people where able to notice with their equipment (or rather in their relatively noisy digital environment).