Astell&Kern

The ultimate portable

This must be counted as one of the audio success stories of recent years, and you must admit that the company has plenty of gumption even thinking that the concept would be viable.

During the last decade this industry has been fed a real smorgasbord of fastfood music, where the goal was quantity, delivered as cheaply as possible, with scant consideration given to quality.

Astell&Kern have unapologetically taken this format and turned it into a high performance medium – and charged accordingly. Their portable players have found a very large fan base in recent times, with good reason – it is the best product in its (rapidly increasing) category. Much of this enthusiasm is generated by the fact that while their players take on the guise of portable players, they can also be used as high quality media servers as well, giving you high performance music both at home and on the go.

Astell&Kern have recently released two new products, one above and one below their existing product line-up.

The new baby of the range is aptly called the AK Jr (pictured right). Despite its (relative) low price there are a number of performance innovations in this unit, with some of the new specs being an improvement on it larger siblings. Possibly the greatest advantages of this new model are size (it is only 6.9mm deep) and the price of $799.

At the other end of the scale is the new AK380 (pictured left). This is an incredible piece of engineering. It is capable of handling 32bit/384kHz files, has advanced jitter reduction, and handles DSD playback. Build quality is superb – manufactured from aircraft-grade aluminium. Of necessity it is larger than its less expensive siblings, hardly surprising given the technology inside. Much has been made of the fact that this unit was designed with the professional audio market in mind (it even has balanced outputs), but the reality is that this is arguably the best performing portable player on the domestic market, and a very good and competitively priced streamer/DAC to boot.

Astell&Kern have also added an amplifier dock, a charging cradle, also with balanced outputs, and an external CD-ROM driver for ripping music to the player without the need for a computer as companion pieces for this unit.

The AK380 sells for $5,599.