escape sequence for special hex values

I'm afraid they can only be disabled by tweaking the IDE's code at the moment... I guess maybe a more readable (if marginally less efficient) way of writing it might be:

String.fromCharCode(0x10,0x20,0x10)

But it depends where you're sending the data. If it's down SPI/I2C then you can just send an array of values rather than a string. You can even do it with the Serial ports using write:

Serial1.write([0x10,0x20,0x10])