K-03

[bzr]

At the moment I am reshuffling the room/rack/sound of my system as I have a potential buyer for my MSB gear with the condition of sight & sound of the said gear. I know they will love it as it will be demoed to them by the Australian importer & who also happens to make some of the best speakers in Australia as well.
So, the start of the story is I ring up one of my trusted dealers to start the auditioning to see where my ears will lead me, he shows up on Saturday at my door with none other than Graham/audiot servant here on the forum & an Esoteric K-03.
After the usual 5 second greeting when there are more pressing matters as in music to listen to, we sat & listened to the MSB with the Strads. The room is still unfinished as in sound treatment, the speakers have been positioned by my ears only within the last week so things really aren't at optimum but the sound is still pretty good, well, according to my guests it was. The Strads are just going 200 hrs now so they will open up & really start to shine in the future albeit with the evident signature of the system starting to show itself. The MSB dac with the clock installed is one very easy listening dac that shows a lot of forgiveness to below par recordings & is really one very top of the heap pieces that I have had the pleasure of owning.
Enter the K-03, remove dac from rack, use existing MSB S200 amp as power & proceed to listen. The Esoteric has ample time under it's belt so no worries in that area, it's the demo unit & demo it did in my opinion better than I thought it would. Here's a unit that has a rrp of a 1/3 of the MSB Diamond Dac IV & when I first heard it I thought wow, this is good! All my listening so far has been through usb from the mbpro as is a fair comparison as that is all I did listen with, with the MSB.
The sound of the K-03 would be fair to say as quite truthful to the recordings, at times you will get digital glare/fatigue with the bad recordings but with music that I know well & have heard the quality of sound in the recording I listen to it & think "hell, this is a good thing!"
Is it as good as what i have at the mo, not nearly but for the price it is probably one of the better bargains I have heard for some time for someone that wants to step up another level. To go better than this you'll have to slide into the 01 designation of the K series & that is where the serious hardware is applied to the line & things start to take a jump in price pretty quickly with matching components. Esoteric are definitely onto something here, I'll give it a P.S. Was great to meet you Graham & you are welcome anytime to keep an ear on the room,

[bart]

Kev, thanks for sharing!

[audiot servant]

Hey Kev,,
Was great to be able catch up and share some music and beers... of which you do both in very fine order :-)... it really is a fantastic space you are making for yourselves up there and that room with the Strads and 2301s is going to be awesome.

I also thought that the K03 made the system sing but then I think there will always be a little part of Casa Kev that has MSB on it somewhere... That is just one killer DAC :-)

Always great to share tunes but more than that it was a joy to meet you both...

Look forward to catching up again
best wishes
Graham

Sent from my iPhone using A.Aficionado

[KahunaCanuck]

Great write up...sharing is what makes this site great...

[bart]

Originally Posted by KahunaCanuck

Great write up...sharing is what makes this site great...