Leave the turntable at home with Astell & Kern’s audiophile-approved AK100 audio player

By Peter Suciu Published January 28, 2013

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Check out our full review of the iRiver Astell & Kern AK100 audio player.

Portable digital music players are great for taking music on the go, but as any audiophile will attest, it comes at the cost of reduced quality. If you can accept this fact, MP3s are totally for you. For the more discerning audio connoisseur, it takes more than an iPod to get the job done.

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Astell & Kern’s AK100 portable audio system from iRiver is just such a device. The beefy high-fi music player skirts the scourge of compression with support for lossless Mastering Sound Quality files, along with Ogg, FLAC, WAV, WMA, APE and of course, ordinary MP3s.

A 2.4-inch touchscreen provides control, while a high-end Wolfson 8740 DAC handles turning bits and bytes into audio. Interestingly, it can double as an outboard DAC for computers and CD players connected via the integrated optical output or USB port. It comes with 32GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to 96GB via two microSD card slots. A 2,000mAH battery provides up to 16 hours of continuous audio playback.

The Astell & Kern AK100 portable audio system will retail for $700.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Peter has spent much time plugging and unplugging various A/V equipment over the years as a reviewer, and he is always on the…

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Miss the iPod? Astell and Kern has the cure — for a price

Astell & Kern Kann Max portable digital audio player.

In a move that has been anticipated for years, Apple finally -- if somewhat awkwardly -- confirmed that it will no longer make the iPod Touch, the last remaining iPod version. The reasons, according to Apple are clear: Given our ability to access music through all of our other digital devices (phones, laptops, tablets, and smart speakers), we've all moved beyond needing a dedicated device for listening to music on-the-go, especially one that can't connect to streaming services like Apple Music through mobile data.

That may be true, but Apple's devices have in any case never fully satisfied audiophiles -- a group of music lovers who expect convenience to go hand-in-hand with quality, not one at the expense of the other. Astell&Kern's (A&K) lineup of hi-res digital audio players has been filling that quality gap for a while now, and its newest products push portable listening to new heights -- both in terms of performance and price. Here's what the Korean audio brand is set to debut this month at High End Munich, a show that caters to the most discerning listeners on the planet:
A&K Kann Max, $1,299, available in June 2022

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Astell & Kern’s first BT speaker offers hi-fi sound for $499

Astell & Kern Acro BE100 speaker.

Want a decent Bluetooth speaker for portability or beach parties? There's no end of choices at a wide range f prices -- Amazon literally has hundreds to choose from. But if what you want is a high-end speaker that also offers the convenience of Bluetooth, we're now down to a much smaller group of products. As of February 25, you'll have one more to consider. That's when Astell & Kern (A&K) starts taking pre-orders on its first-ever Bluetooth speaker, the $499 Acro BE100 -- a sharp-looking device that comes in both black and white to fit in with most decors. It starts shipping on March 7.

Now $499 is a pretty hefty price to pay for a Bluetooth speaker, especially when you consider the Acro BE100 isn't fully portable (there's no battery), it doesn't double as a Google- or Amazon-powered smart speaker, and it can't connect to Wi-Fi or even connect to other Acro BE100s for stereo or multiroom sound. That means the BE100 will have to offer something pretty special to draw potential buyers away from more capable options like the $549 Sonos Five or the $349 Bose Home Speaker 500.

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Astell&Kern blurs the line between headphone amp and digital audio player

Astell&Kern Arco CA1000 headphone amp and digital audio player held in someone's hand.

For audiophiles, dedicated headphone amps are a key component in their personal audio arsenal, one that lets them get the most out of their preferred wired cans. But Astell&Kern (A&K) clearly believes we haven't been expecting enough from these devices, so it has launched the $2,199 A&K Acro CA1000, a so-called "carriable" headphone amp that packs its own internal rechargeable battery as well as a full-featured, hi-res audio digital audio player. The pricey but capable hybrid gadget will be available January 24 at authorized Astell&Kern dealers in the U.S. and Canada.

The Acro CA1000 ticks an enormous number of boxes for folks who want maximum flexibility for controlling and enjoying digital music. It has two sizes of balanced outputs (2.5 and 4.4mm) and two sizes of unbalanced jacks (3.5 and 6.35mm), which should work with a majority of both general use headphones as well as audiophile-grade models. The built-in digital audio player -- accessed via a multi-angle touchscreen -- pumps data through a quad set of ES9068AS digital-to-analog converters (DACs), and they'll handily crunch any file you throw at them, including WAV, FLAC, WMA, MP3, OGG, APE, AAC, ALAC, AIFF, DFF, DSF, plus there's full rendering support for the MQA format and bit-perfect playback of up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM and native DSD512 (22.4MHz) tracks.