I heard a costly system from Esoteric.

@jackhifiguy, you are not here to learn,  you're here hoping to find someone who agrees with you, a kindred spirit if you will, to justify your apparent dislike of Esoteric products but it seems to go deeper as if you were dissed, hurt, by a woman or a friend.  "Egregious flight from truth"?  Those lying copywriters at Esoteric, sheesh!  Esoteric knows a lot about dual-mono designs and their top DAC is even built with separate chassis'.  You can use a single transformer and chassis and be a dual mono design.  I'm not sure about the slow read times for the Esoteric K-03, but is that as important as the fantastic sound quality that the player produces? The replacement player for the discontinued K-03, the K-03XD has been improved in every way.  It can process any digital signal out there.  From the comfort of the listening position you can do all sorts of things, besides being able to play either layer from cd/sacd as most machines default to sacd, you can upsample cd's 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, all the way to DSD before converting to analog, and do this in real-time from the remote.  The entire signal path is discrete from input to output and that includes the dacs amplifier (I/V) which probably explains the un digital music that comes out of it. Even just plain Redbook CDs sound fabulous.  And frankly, that goes for any Esoteric player of any vintage that I've heard.

  The F-05 on the other hand is another amazing product.  I own a Rega Elicit-R Int amp and on paper, they look similar but when driving my ATC 19 v2, do not sound at all the same.  Don't get me wrong, I think the Rega is great but compared to the Esoteric, sounds somewhat anemic ( maybe too strong a word).  The F-05 uses some of the latest output devices rated at 30 amps. This amp takes control of the ATCs with aplomb. Some of its features include being able to adjust the output level, separately of every input plus a nice feature when changing inputs from various sources, the volume goes down then ramps up again, nice.  I know this because I own an F-05 and K-03XD and you know what, I never tried headphones with it and to judge its sound only through headphones sounds ridiculous.

Vitus....The K-03 is over a decade old. The 3XD is not the one that replaced it. Your forgetting the K-03X, K-03XS and maybe another one that my old brain cant remember. Esoterics UPGRADE cycle is like every 2-3 years when they spin out the replacement models.

One more thing, master clock generators or typically known as a word clocks don't speed up functions of the player but take the data stream, samples to an even higher rate of accuracy making for even better sound.  Expensive? You bet, but the difference is not subtle.  They're like the icing on a cake.  I listened to one connected to a K-03XD and an all-out five chassis full-on Grandioso setup that I couldn't tell you the cost of but can tell you weighed in at two-hundred and seventy pounds, give or take a pound or two.  

Isn’t esoteric the company which until recently the owners of certain players got stiffed by having to pay $2,500 just for shipping costs to send their players to Japan for repair, and that did not include the outrageous repair costs themselves?

Wow, great company, great customer service. But if you're okay being treated that way and then recommending them to others, hey, c’est la vie.

Yea its better to have a High End OPPO 103 Clone that Ayre has no parts for at all should anything go wrong. (And they havent had parts for it going back to 2016 when I first inquired).  Get the most out of your 50 Pound Doorstop while you can. LOL   Instead of posting on Audiogon endlessly all day every day get a 2nd Job so you can buy some modern day gear instead of that using that Fossilized mediocrity from the stone age.  At the very least get a GEER BOX so that you can hook that Ayre/Oppo Clone up to a better Dac.