AudioAficionado.org - Bad review of N-01 in Stereophile?

I do not have an N-01 and have never heard one but I am pretty familiar with this generation and level of digital Esoteric products so I was pretty surprised to read what passes in the audiophile world as a bad review of the Esoteric N-01 in the September 2018 issue by Jason Victor Serinus.

Of course reviews are reviews and its fair to be negative in one. But the standards in audiophile reviews curve the grades to aim high (as is not unreasonable given that these products are engineered to extremely high cost to be A+) so that class average at this price level and from an experienced manufacturer is normally an average of over the top praise. So what happened here?

Well from the first half of the review its clear that the reviewer had a very frustrating IT experience "Given that the N-01 froze more times than you might ever wish, I rapidly became a certifiable expert in pulling its power cord out just far enough to turn everything off, then reinserting it, without disrupting a shitload of connector cables" and "...the N-01 produced no sound and wouldn't respond to presses of its power button...only after I'd quit the app, unplugged and plugged in the power cord, let the N-01 reboot, breathed deeply and started from scratch could I hear music again. My dogs learned to put their paws over their ears to avoid hearing exclamations that the FCC deems unfit for the airwaves. Eventually, I recited the Serenity Prayer and got on with it." He then says that after his review was done he was told Esoteric issued an update that addressed the problem. So before he ever comments on sound quality he was already in a foul mood, cursing a blue streak at the N-01 and his nerves shot. (I am sympathetic, I hate dealing with IT shit. This is why I like spinning discs!) I just wonder if this was the right frame of mind to then provide an unbiased view of the sound quality, a separate issue?

His statements on sound struck me as quite negative given the standards of reviews in the field. Praise is faint ("very fine indeed"). He often relates a stream of negative appraisals like "...tambourine sounded a mite too rattly, the woodwinds beautiful but not supremely color-saturated and the soundstage boundaries vague. There was also a pervasive grayness to the space between notes. " and later "Depth was okay, but the sense of space was less than I'm accustomed to from DSD128 files...strings also sounded a mite thin and glassy and lacked warmth" However, he says in both cases that these negatives largely went away when adding in a dCS external word clock but hastens to add that he did most listening without the clock since others might not have it.

Which raises the other oddity in this review. The reference of comparison. Normally in these types of reviews, the reviewer bends over backwards to be positive about the item under reviewer by picking as the comparison a product which is either long-in-the-tooth (The Metronome Kalista CD player at $43k is compared elsewhere in the issue to a 17 year old Sony player) or to a lower quality, cheaper unit so the reviewed product towers over it or to something so much more expensive that the reviewer can say that the piece under study gets "closer than it should" to the higher cost product given the disparity in price. Not so here! The N-01 ($20k) is compared to the dCS Rossini DAC ($24k) which is state of the art, the latter apparently with its mates dCS Scarlatti clock and dCS Paganini SACD/CD Transport, in other words a dCS stack! The reviewer than acknowledges he had "a wicked cold which temporarily plugged his ears" (what a mood in which to conduct a review, IT problems that cause swearing followed by a deafening head cold!). So he brings in a musician friend who much prefers the Rossini in every comparison though he chimes in from his sickbed "I was certain that the Rossini was delivering more air and sense of hall, as well as clearer, more transparent sound.. The over and undertones of the thwacks on the biggest bass drum sounded more lifelike...there was no contest in the transparency, color saturation and contrast, three-dimensionality, air and transients. Save for the bass, there was more there there. Which is not to diminish the fact that the N-01 has one of the best-sounding presentations I've heard from a network player/DAC in its price range." Really?

Again, I have never heard the N-01 myself. But the reviewer also wrote "Throughout the weeks of intensive listening...the N-01's tonal gestalt sounded remarkably similar to what I've heard from Esoteric gear at audio shows; extremely detailed, balanced, and fleshed out, with superb bass, but with a bit of gray patina that reduced sparkle. Warm and fuzzy, romantic and lush are not terms I would ever use to describe the N-01's sound." This made me think the reviewer was sort of dissing the whole Esoteric line, wow. I usually describe my own Esoteric K1 (same DAC chips as the N-01) as sounding extremely lush (and I have heard the dCS Rossini) so I am rather confused how this reviewer describes the Esoteric house sound.

What happened here? Was the N-01 malfunctioning not only in its evident data transmission but in its audio? Was the reviewer already in too bad a mood from the N-01's IT problems and his head cold to not trash the N-01? Or was the benchmark unfair (dCS stack) while leaving out the clock for the N-01? Having worked with these clocks I know that implementation synergy is critical (the dCS clock output impedance is 75 ohm, the Esoteric input impedance is 50 ohm and my experience is that this makes a difference). So the dCS unit got the matching clocking and the N-01 got the mismatching clock. Or is none of this relevant and the reviewer and his mate just found the dCS to be vastly better than the Esoteric? As I said at the start, this review struck me as very unusual and far from what I've experienced with the same or similar products that I suspect more going on here.

Your thoughts?