Esoteric P-03 Universal Disc Transport and D-03 Digital-to-Analog Converter

A Transparent Window On The Source

Rarely do these disparate evaluation methods converge; there are some products I admire for their audiophile attributes more than I enjoy for their musicality (they satisfy all the specific sonic checkmarks, but lack a certain indefinable magic), and others that are obviously colored but somehow manage to pull me into the music every time I sit down.

The Esoteric D-03/P-03 pair lives in the rarified company of digital sources that are outstanding by any evaluation criterion. For starters, the Esoteric is chameleon-like in its portrayal of different recordings—from tonal balance, to liquidity, to space, to overall perspective, to dynamics, the Esoteric’s sound is as variable as the disc you place in its drawer. The P-03/D-03 also excels in all the audiophile values; the pair hits all the right audiophile buttons. But most importantly—by a long shot—the Esoteric combination is immensely engaging musically. Put all this together and you’ve got a world-class digital source that’s among the few best I’ve heard.

I was taken aback by the Esoteric’s lack of a “sound.” I was unable to pin down any specific character I could attribute to the player. Just when I thought I’d identified a coloration, changing discs or switching to a different kind of music would prove me wrong. Listening through the P-03/D-03 was like looking back into the recording through a transparent window.

This lack of coloration conferred many wonderful attributes. The sense of hearing back through the playback chain to the original acoustic event gave the music a life and vividness that was startling. Tiny nuances in expression came to the forefront, which fostered the impression of hearing live music-making as it was happening rather than of listening to a canned reproduction. The Esoteric pair is hyper-detailed and vivid musically without a trace of sonic vividness. I heard a richly woven musical tapestry that encouraged, particularly in jazz, a constant changing of focus from one musician to another, of discovering a drum lick that perfectly complemented the soloist’s melodic line.

The Esoteric’s transparency to the source also paid dividends in reproduction of tone color. Instrumental timbres, rather than sounding overlaid by grain, hardness, or a common character, were instead natural and realistic. I was particularly taken by the Esoteric’s reproduction of oboe, bassoon, and bass clarinet— instruments that seem to convey feeling purely through their tone colors. A good example is Zappa’s The Yellow Shark, an orchestral album performed by Germany’s new-music group Ensemble Modern. The Esoteric’s purity of tone color brought out more expression in the compositions and their performances.

Recordings that combined woodwind and brass instruments in complex arrangements highlighted the Esoteric’s beautiful portrayal of timbre. Listening, for examples, to the rich interplay of tone colors in trumpeter Jon Faddis’ beautiful DVD-A Remembrances [Chesky] or what is perhaps the bestsounding big-band recording ever made, Dick Hyman’s From the Age of Swing [Reference Recordings], I could clearly hear the timbre of each instrument within the overall sound, rather than hearing separate instruments congeal into a synthetic whole. I also noticed this quality on unison phrases between instruments, such as sax and trumpet. This ability to hear quiet instruments with their timbres preserved in the presence of louder instruments contributed to my ability to hear more deeply into the music. The Zappa piece “The Black Page” (the live version from Make a Jazz Noise Here), which Zappa describes as having “statistical density,” was a good example; the Esoteric unraveled the many layers of rhythmic and melodic innovation that make this composition a masterpiece. (Incidentally, there’s a very interesting entry on Wikipedia on “The Black Page.”)

The Esoteric’s bottom-end was extraordinarily weighty, full, and dynamic. If the Esoteric had any identifiable sonic signature, it was a slight fullness in the midbass that added a measure of warmth to bass guitar and acoustic bass, as well as a heightened sense of power on lower-tuned toms. The thunderous tomtom fill midway through the track “Gaia” from James Taylor’s Hourglass SACD had greater weight and heft through the Esoteric. But the added touch of bass weight didn’t detract from the sense of pitch or dynamic agility.

In the portrayal of space, and of individual images within that space, the Esoteric was world-class. The soundstage was stunningly wide, throwing images beyond the confines of the loudspeakers in an almost wrap-around effect. Image focus was tight, accompanied by a sense of air and bloom around instrumental outlines. The spatial perspective tended to be vivid and sharply defined, but was never forward, aggressive, or artificially sculpted. As mentioned earlier, the sense of space changed dramatically with the recording, from the intimacy of a solo acoustic guitar to the huge and gorgeous acoustic of Myerson Symphony Center captured in Keith Johnson’s spectacular recordings on the Reference Recordings label.