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New Esoteric K-03XD

Just bought this SACD Player a month ago. 
It took me a while to get into the hidden menu. 
It sounded great with CD’s, amazing actually. 
I tried it with 2 SACD’s I had lying around. 
One was a Sony Demo, the other a SACD from a friend. 
They sounded great, but not as good as my good CD’s. 
I bought a few more, all remastered old recordings. 
I was disappointed. 
There was a review on The Absolute Sound about a similar Esoteric. 
The reviewer said when it was set to “default” it wasn’t overwhelming. 
He went into the hidden menu and changed some settings. 
Today, I started experimenting. 
I'm glad I did. 
I'm listening to “Trinity Sessons” on CD, by the Cowboy Junkies. 
I've never heard it sound this good !

The reason for the post is, have anyone else changed those settings, and which ones. 

stevizzy

Showing 2 responses by davetheoilguy

davetheoilguy
156 posts
 

How are you enjoying the K-03, otherwise?

It's a really impressive on the transport side, mechanically.  Nicely done.  Other than something super-specialized I can't think of a better one.

davetheoilguy
156 posts
 

@stevizzy 

Good to hear!  The transport is pretty much the same as in a DCS Vivaldi Apex one (the one that combines all the components of the DCS component system into one box). That says something.  Heck it’s the same transport that’s in the k01XD.

The k-03xd has an excellent DAC, but it has several digital outputs, so if you ever get antsy to try something new, you can easily bypass the internal DAC and attach to something like a Mola Mola Tambaqui or the DCS Vivaldi (or whatever is the shiniest DAC at the time you decide to tweak).

I’ve just been generally impressed with Esoteric products for a long time.  I vacillated for six months between the Grandioso monoblocks and the Classe Delta monoblocks, finally going with Classe only because I have Bowers 800s and the Classe were literally designed to pair with the Bowers (same company at the time).

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