The DV-50s excelled in playing SACD’s when it was introduced, and today it remains an exceptional standalone SACD/CD player and CD transport.

This piece is in overall very good condition, with some light scratching/scuffing on the top panel and disc drawer as indicated in the photos.  It played every disc we threw at it without issue or pause.

From an excellent Stereophile review by Paul Bolin (Note the DV-50 Paul references was replaced by this DV-50s, and video performance was the only item upgraded on the “s” model):

“The DV-50 will play any “Red Book” CD, any DVD-Audio CD (single or dual-layer), linear or packed PCM digital audio, all SACD’s (single or dual-layer, stereo or multichannel), and MP3 files burned to CD-R or CD-RW with 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample rates. I may be missing something here, but you get the point. The only audio-related feature you don’t get is HDCD decoding.”

“The Esoteric DV-50 is the most fun you can have with digital music playback short of the dCS trio reviewed by Michael Fremer in April 2003 (Vol.26 No.4). Given that the dCS gear costs about six times as much as the DV-50, the Esoteric is a screaming bargain, especially considering its hyper-advanced technology, bulletproof build, and exceptional sound. You can even play movies on it.”

“The DV-50 includes massively powerful upconversion/digital filtering facilities. A front-panel switch lets the user select between two different filters or combine the two. The first filter, identified as FIR (presumably for Finite Impulse Response) provides a fixed 8x upconversion, yielding rates of 352.8kHz for conventional CDs and 384kHz, 768kHz, or 1536kHz for DVDs, depending on whether the latter was mastered at 48, 96, or 192kHz resolution. This filter is described in the manual as having “a sharp roll-off and firmly defined bass characteristics.”

The second filter, called RDOT by Esoteric, “uses fluency theory” and “has a slow roll-off and natural extended audio characteristics.” This filter provides frequency multiplication (upconversion) to a 705.6kHz rate with conventional 16/44.1 CDs, and upconverts DVD to 768kHz. There is some dizzying number-crunching going on inside the Esoteric.”