Esoteric K-01/K-03 Owners

Guido,

I am using the Sandisk Cruzer with 128 GB on board. It is a high speed 2.0 usb thumb drive. I think these are easily available nowadays.

Does the Marantz player support large SSDs formatted as NTFS inside USB enclosures? E.g. The Samsung 850 Pro 1TB?

Only usb drives formatted as FAT16 or FAT32 is supported. Unfortunately, NTFS formatted SSD drives cannot be played by the 8005.

Just to add, if you want to play from your large SSD drive via your computer, you need to use the internal dac. All computer usb connections need to go through the internal dac and then via analog outputs to the preamp.
To connect directly to your own dac, only usb flash drives plugged into the front or rear panel ports allow digital output.
Another very big plus in ditching the computer is the handheld remote that allows you to scroll through all your music folders and files instead of having to get off the chair and use the mouse to open them. Of course you can use the app on your smartphone or tablet to control the player but then you need a wireless connection to your computer for this. The purist way for pc audio would be to turn off all wireless connections during playback.

Hi John, I hope that at some point Esoteric will see it fit to add a mass storage bay to its players... Imagine a hypothetical K-01Y, similar to K-01 and K-01X, but with a user accessible slot where an arbitrarely large SSD can be inserted.... Redbook would be loaded onto the SSD from this player's own transport, while Hi Resolution material would be loaded from an external source via USB, SPDIF, Ethernet, or something else.

G.